There's Joe Scarborough, softly singing "Glory Days" under his breath as he remininisces about the kinder, gentler, more principled shutdown under Newt Gingrich while he talks about the current clown show that's heading for a federal shutdown. (He draws no historical lines between that anarchy and this anarchy.)

"When I was in Congress, we were blessed and we had people that wanted to balance the budget, so we balanced the budget four times in a row, and the only time it happened in a century. This is unlike that group, and this group doesn't really care about balancing budgets," Scarborough said.

(And don't forget, Joe's foot soldiers in the Gingrich Revolution cut the capital gains tax! And so on.)

"They don't really care about policy. They've shown us that time and time again. It's all gesturing. We will try and shut down the government. Why? Just because we want to gesture. We want to gesture to somebody. We really don't care about policy, we don't care about balancing the budgets, and we don't care about the troops or military readiness. So we're gonna shut down the government. We are not even going to bring the funding bill up for a vote. We won't let it get to the floor.

"Meanwhile in the Senate, you got Tommy Tuberville and others doing everything they can to gut military readiness, too. What a long, long distance between the Republicans we were and what we are now under Trump."

"Yeah, they are just not interested in anything other than getting on TV and being able to perform, and having people send them money and contributions and get airtime," George Conway said.

"They don't have any policy positions that matter to them, because if they were trying to do that, they'd try to work towards a compromise where they would get some of what they want, even though it's just not possible to get all of it. It's all about performance.

"It's all about -- they don't even care about having the majority. They are willing to sacrifice those moderate Republicans that you just showed on air here, that they're willing to basically jettison them -- because who needs them? They don't need a majority because they are not governing. All they want to do is send sand in the gears and if the car keeps on going, it was a terrible car anyway. They're nihilists."