Republican senator too lazy to use Google finally gets his answer

NBC's Chuck Todd reports what one Republican senator told him after attending last night's dinner with President Barack Obama:

In fact, one senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn't shared that list with them before.

That list is here. Senators didn't need "leadership" to share it with them. They could have gotten it within ten seconds on Google. All it would have taken was a willingness to pay a little attention to the world outside the conservative bubble.

I know these guys are Republicans, but I guarantee you that each senator at that dinner last night has progressive constituents who were outraged when they saw some of the cuts President Obama proposed for a Grand Bargain. If their constituents were capable of figuring out what the president had proposed, the senators should have been too. But instead of doing something crazy like, you know, actually having a rational and factual basis for their political positions, these guys apparently just jam their fingers in their ears and chant "I'm against it".

And I'm not just picking on one anonymous senator, either. Last week, Ezra Klein reported that a high-ranking House Republican was completely unaware that Obama's Grand Bargain proposal includes a reduction in Social Security spending via Chained CPI. Then, a few days later, a top GOP consultant made the same mistake, in hilarious fashion.

Within official Washington, last night's dinner was a received as a positive sign that the nation's capitol can actually get something accomplished. But with stories like this, what it really revealed is that D.C. is even more dysfunctional than we ever imagined possible.