Today GOP Senator Roy Blunt voted to shutdown the government. He’s made noises in the past that indicated he knew just how wrong and stupid such an event would be. But he did it anyway. Last Wednesday I wrote about Blunt’s effort to confuse us with his fancy dancing around the issues:

No matter what, though, don’t let him sell you any of his equivocating mumbo-jumbo; when push comes to shove he will have told us by means of his vote on the Continuing Resolution whether or not he’s decided that, discretion being the better part of valor, it behoves him to kiss the ring on Rush Limbaugh’s hand and cede the Republican Party to big, bad Ted Cruz.

So now we know what it means to be Republican in this day and age and suffice it to say it isn’t pretty. Duane Graham of The Erstwhile Conservative understands just why Blunt migrated from the dark side to the pitch-black GOP netherworld:

… even though Democrats prevailed on the vote, I’m sure that all the soldier-loving, Social Security-sucking seniors in Missouri who put Blunt in office are as happy as can be that he voted with 43 other Republicans, many with grossly undeserved reputations for “reasonableness,” to show the world that the United States government is just one Republican-friendly election away from Tea Party disaster.

Disgust at Blunt’s craven behavior aside, this whole situation has lots of potential to burn Republicans badly – no matter how they attempt to squirm and wiggle their way out of the trap they have built for themselves. As Michael Tomasky aptly puts it:

You can only set so many houses on fire before people finally figure out that this isn’t happening by accident and you must be an arsonist. The GOP is now flirting with that moment. It can’t come soon enough.

Blunt seems to have some primitive awareness that something really, really bad could be waiting at the end of the current GOP trail, which could be why, although he has conceded the budget fights to the Cruzians in his party, he has refused to endorse the ugly suggestion of Missouri’s fully insured (at taxpayer expense) Lieutenant Governor, Peter Kinder, that uninsured Missourians boycott the Obamacare exchanges. Blunt, unlike Kinder, is not a total idiot and I am guessing that he’s figured out that if too many innocent bystanders get burned in the GOP Götterdämmerung, even agile corporatist equivocators like himself might go up in smoke come election time.