Ready, fire, aim.
The fundamental issue at the heart of all this is not Obamacare.
It is not the debt ceiling.
It is not Ted Cruz, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell or even Barack Obama.
The issue at the heart of all of this is busing.
Clarification coming.
(CNN) -- The Senate for a fourth time rejected a spending plan by House Republicans that included a provision to undermine Obamacare, also spurning a GOP call to set up a conference committee that would seek a compromise in the stalemate that caused the government to shut down Tuesday.
The game of chicken failed. Neither side blinked. Now millions will pay the price.
Americans watched a colossal failure by Congress overnight and the shutdown of their government.
For weeks, the House and the Senate blamed and bickered, each claiming they're standing up for what the public wants.
In the end, it led to the one outcome nobody wanted -- one that will stop 800,000 Americans from getting paid and could cost the economy about $1 billion a week.
"Agencies should now execute plans for an orderly shutdown due to the absence of appropriations," the Office of Management and Budget said in a note it sent to federal employees.
This is the first time the government has shut down in nearly 18 years. The last time it did, the stalemate lasted 21 days during the Clinton administration.
If memory serves, childhood was a time of not only frolic and fancy, but of learning life lessons.
Included among those lessons were instructions in simple acts of etiquette.
Holding the door for someone.
Opening a door for someone.
Picking up something that someone has dropped.
And in the case of a lady or a child or someone obviously in need of it, giving up one's seat when there are no other seats available.
It's tricky business offering up short punch line type platitudes about the whys and wheres of the pitiful performance of the Executive and Legislative branches of the United States government because pundits and politicians will offer up, before your platitude has finished leaving your lips, that these things are complicated and there are no simple answers.
But just like the vast, intricate complicated system of veins and arteries that make up our circulatory systems, there exists something at the center of it all that either performs properly or does not.
In the case of our blood flow, that would be, of course, the heart.
In the case of what's going on in D.C. this time around (and isn't it sad to say that an event like a shutdown of the Federal Government has become so un-unusual that it can be referenced with a phrase like "this time around"?), the center of it all is, simply, this.
Self interest, once a prominent member of the chorus in the little off Beltway production known as "Washington D.C", has shoved, bullied and intimidated its way to the center of the spotlight, unyielding in its ego, unwilling to even consider sharing the stage with anyone or anything.
And, mixing of the metaphors duly noted, the audience, rather than being transported to new and exciting opportunities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are pretty much being thrown under the bus.
Just as well.
There's no room inside the bus right now anyway.
Nobody in our nation's capital has the slightest intention of giving up their seat.
And while we traditionally bitch and moan and swear and threaten, we never seem to force them out of it.
Because we don't recognize the real issue at the heart of all of this.
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