“Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.”

— Groucho Marx —

While the quote might seem nonsensical, it makes about as much sense as Congress does right now.

The government is shut down. National parks are closed (don’t even mention that to folks on the Delta). The Blue Angels had to cancel/postpone the 50th anniversary celebration of the Naval Aviation Museum set for this weekend. Rank and file employees have been furloughed without pay.

But the men and women of Congress are still getting their paychecks. Well isn’t that special?

The past two weeks or so have been frantic for me. It looks like things might settle down next week. Trying to cover the county commission in Bay Minette and get a new editor up to speed in Fairhope took up most of Tuesday, the first day of the shutdown.

But I was thrilled to see the group of veterans from the Mississippi Gulf Coast on an Honor Flight who stormed the closed World War II memorial much like the Greatest Generation stormed the beaches at Normandy. And not a shot was fired Oct. 1, except for some political ones.

Honor Flight is a wonderful thing. In just one day, veterans are loaded on a plane, flown to Washington D.C., taken to the memorial and then taken back home that night. Doing it all in one long, busy day is necessary for most of the aging vets. But on their one day in the capital earlier this week, there was a barricade across the front.

Who started the act of civil disobedience is questionable. Some have given credit to a Congressman, whose very own vote helped set the shutdown in motion. I hope and prefer to believe it was a veteran. The fact that the veterans hailed from my home state made me even prouder. I wasn’t that happy when I started seeing video of politicians using the veterans as a political tool, claiming it was the other side’s fault these men, women and their families were being kept away from a public memorial.

As the Mississippi vets were leaving the site, an Honor Flight group from Iowa was just arriving. National Park Service rangers quietly told people the park was closed to the public, but the public continued to pour in. Any attempt to stop them would have unleashed a political nightmare of epic proportions.

It was only the following day that I learned one of the vets was someone I actually knew. His daughter posted pictures of him on her Facebook page.

In my humble opinion, the shutdown spotlights the problems with federal politics. Party lines have been drawn in the sand and neither side will cross over. I’m sure something will be worked out but we won’t have to wait for the next big issue to come up. On Oct. 17, the nation will reach it’s debt ceiling.

To use an analogy most people will understand, in two weeks, the nation will have maxed out all its credit cards — we are spending money faster than the tax revenues are coming in. If that happened to you or me, we would have to sit down and seriously reduce spending. I’d be eating beans and ramen noodles for quite a while to get the credit cards paid off, or at least under control.

I mean, that makes sense. Right? But not to Washington. Instead of cutting back and not going out to eat four times a week, they are going to call the credit card companies and get them to raise the credit limit on the credit cards. Problem solved.

But if we keep spending more than we have, it’s only a matter of time before we hit the new credit limit.

The folks of Baldwin County have an opportunity coming up to select a new Congressman. Now is the chance to send someone to D.C. who is not only fiscally responsible but has a lick of common sense.

William Moore is the Senior Editor at Gulf Coast Newspapers. He can be reached at wmoore@gulfcoastnewspapers.com