Impressing voters with their capacity to incessantly embark upon partisan larks extraneous to voters’ lives and concerns, to fly ideological kamikaze missions such as causing debt default or passing legislation with zero ability to survive in the Earth’s soil beyond the House chamber, the Republican majority in the House has been nothing if not consistent. This week the Republican majority of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sought to reinforce that impression by giving the world another memorable straitjacket moment: voting Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

There was never any expectation the next Three Stooges movie would diverge from buffoonish slapstick and there is no expectation the Republican House will suddenly do something sensible or barely sane. If you want representatives whose actions mirror the obsessions of pale folks dressed in tri-cornered hats holding badly-spelled signs and poorly reasoned, ill-informed opinions, Republican members of the House are your cup of kooky tea.

Politically speaking, this latest uncontrollable House Republican urge to advertise its own estrangement from the mainstream concerns of American citizens is highly beneficial to Democrats and to the re-election of President Obama, and I thank them for their lack of self-control.  Reminding voters once again that the Republican Party in power invariably becomes preoccupied with ideologically self-indulgent theater, unrelentingly partisan obstructionism and sabotage of good faith efforts to address the challenges facing United States citizens is doing God’s work for Democrats.

The Fast and Furious program was an effort begun by the ATF during the Bush administration intended to track illegal gun sales in the United States to drug cartels in Mexico. Though Attorney General Holder terminated the program and though reasonable people might conclude that determining the lethal consequences of these sales (Remember that Arizona has justified all manner of barbaric immigration policy with the specter of border violence) was a worthy project, the far right construed this as an affront to the sanctity of the National Rifle Association and an act of blasphemy toward the role of firearms as holy icons in the Republican spiritual system, faulty American history and fetishism playing their part.

Demanding documents from Holder it was understood by Republicans he was obligated to keep secret in order to protect the lives of agents and the viability of operations ongoing was the basis of the Republican con that Holder was failing to cooperate, all in the service to a phantasmagorical gun control plot by the Great Black Socialist. Still, the only thing really important here is that Americans are offered yet another example that Republicans should not retain their House majority, nor for that matter be allowed to handle sharp objects, have unsupervised time with small children or keep the laces in their shoes.

At the very least, the reality-based community owes House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Republicans a debt of gratitude for their unintentional, yet luridly vivid  warning of the perils, frivolities and disorders of elected Republicans, and their distant remove  from ordinary Americans’ priorities and basic mental health.