It has been no small accomplishment for the United States at last to become the envy of Bizarro World, a place where objective truths evade us like the unicorn and up is down and down is up and Wolf Blitzer is forever flummoxed.

One can only assume dinner parties at David Gregory’s house, Sunday show pundits and esteemed anchors and Washington press dukes and duchesses attending, cannot proceed to dining until guests have chewed upon the bristling controversy over whether fork or spoon is superior for moving soup to mouth, given each is a piece of silverware, and balance requires each of them have a case made for its utility. Such are the irreconcilable quandaries that bedevil the panels of Meet The Press.

Mussolini, always the innovator and canny partisan thinker, contrived something called the Acerbo Law, by which legislation it was determined a political party achieving 25% or more of the votes acquired 66% of the seats in parliament. If this brings to the mind innovations employed in Florida, North Carolina or across the nation by the Republican Party there is a very good reason for that, though, whether the Italian press at the time was blessed with hood ornaments of the caliber of Don Lemon and Erin Burnett of CNN, or our friend Mr. Gregory at Meet the Press to moderate the equally meritorious cases for categorically polarized positions in such strictly partisan scuffles, it is not known by be personally I confess.

Whether in 1933, when the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was introduced in Germany, by which Jewish, and other “politically unreliable” civil servants and other employees were excluded from state service, the first of several laws to anticipate the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 institutionalizing the prevailing party’s ideology, had the benefit of courageous punditry and reportage as provided by the likes of Politico, delineating the respective partisan policy positions while carefully preserving balance, I confess, I do not know.

There are some of you no doubt, who ponder how it is those who reject Darwin’s Evolution Theory, who designate science’s validation of human caused climate change as the dark deed of notorious pirates, otherwise known as climate scientists,  avow that fetuses masturbate, assert 6,000 years is the age of Earth, who hold the president of the United States is not a citizen, and who espouse the female body denies fertilization in cases of “legitimate rape” or even who believe, as one Republican member of congress recently put it, that default on the nation’s debts “will bring stability to the world’s markets,” could have achieved and then retain substantial influence over the fate of a powerful nation. You should know it is not all the fault of Republican voters’ stupidity, nor the depravity of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, but the Christ awful job the rest of the press does informing Americans what is objectively true, and what is not, what is demonstrably factual and what is clearly false.

On the other hand, perhaps the only flaw is mine. Whether it is more in the vein of a failure of fairness, or perhaps, too narrow a knowledge of things that prevents me from discerning the equal merits of the masturbating and non-masturbating fetus, or the sanguine view and the cautionary one of the eventuality of  a national default, I’ve yet to clarify.

Conceding that the most difficult human endeavor on the face of the Earth at the present time, is apportioning responsibility for the current government shutdown and debt crises, here is something I have discovered:  One party says it will vote to open the government and increase the debt ceiling with no conditions whatsoever attached. Another party vows it will neither vote to reopen the government or to increase the debt ceiling except with the attachment of its own conditions. This seems to be a fairly useful distinction.

Indeed, were one to subject oneself to a deep plunge into the historical archives, it could be discovered that one party alone since 2011, before which, debt ceiling votes were largely only formalities, began to make explicit threats to shut the economy down, and default on the  national debt. Again, making such distinctions is not for everyone.

I even admit forthrightly that my own conclusions on these matters are no more balanced than an automobile would be on the head of a pin.