Bruce O’Connell is an American job creator. All he does is grab his bootstraps, sit down at the table, and create jobs. That’s literally all he does! But thanks to the goose-stepping sturmtruppen of the National Park Service, Bruce O’Connell can’t create jobs no more.
See, Bruce O’Connell creates his jobs on federal land, by running a nearly century-old hotel on a lonely stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And since the National Park Service has been deemed non-essential, O’Connell’s hotel, the Pisgah Inn (the Peak of the Parkway!), is being forced to close. This is a pain in Bruce O’Connell’s big, swingin’ American dick, because the Blue Ridge Parkway offers some of the best leaf-peeping you’ll find south of the Mason-Dixon line, and seeing as it’s October, Bruce O’Connell was hoping to get PAID, cousin.
Thanks to the shutdown, all 100 of O’Connell’s employees are currently watching reruns of “Maury,” spilling Count Chocula on their laps, and masturbating furiously. The shutdown will undoubtedly put a dent in O’Connell’s bottom line, and he’s mad, RILL MAD THO. In a sane world, O’Connell would write to his Congressman and tell him, “Hey, Congressbro, could you stop with this stupid shutdown thing already, please? It is making me a Poor.” Unfortunately, O’Connell is represented by Mark Meadows (R-Pigfucker), a freshman Tea Partier who got to Washington thanks to a lovely little bit of gerrymandering. Come along and let’s look at America’s current self-inflicted shitstorm in microcosm!
The Pisgah Inn sits about a dozen miles southwest of Asheville, NC, a town with a well-deserved reputation for being a bunch of no-good, dope-smokin’ hippies. Asheville is flue as buck, and its nearly 86,000 people were once the electoral center of gravity in the North Carolina 11th Congressional District. But the folks in the foothills around Asheville are about as conservative as you’d expect hill people to be in western North Carolina, and they don’t care for Nobummer and Moochelle and certainly not for this Benghazi they’ve been hearing so much about.
For six years, this part of our once-great nation was represented by Blue Dog Democrat and absolutely terrible NFL quarterback Heath Shuler. Then 2010 happened, and wouldn’t ya know it, the new maps had split Asheville’s reliably Democratic voters between the new 10th and 11th districts. Just a few years ago, this part of North Carolina was represented by a three-term conservative Democrat; today, freshman Tea Partiers reign supreme in what are perhaps the state’s most reliably Republican districts.
Tea Party hero Mark Meadows, however, can’t spare any bootstraps for his constituent Bruce O’Connell, because Mark Meadows believes we need to shut down the government, for freedom. Remember when those 80 House Republicans wrote a letter to Sad John Boehner, asking him to “affirmatively de-fund the implementation of ObamaCare in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor?” Mark Meadows’s signature is the first one on the bill. He’s literally the John Hancock of North Carolinian job-murdering derp .
Somewhere in the hills outside Asheville, Bruce O’Connell is sad because he is not making money, and some of his laid-off employees are totally smoking meth, because Wednesday, am I right? Despite operating one of only two privately owned inns on the Blue Ridge Parkway and benefiting from restrictive permitting processes that will ensure that the Pisgah Inn remains the only place to take a piss and buy a Mountain Dew Code Red for miles around, Bruce O’Connell is doing his best Tom Petty and insisting that he won’t. back. down. “It’s conscience and conviction that have taken over me,” O’Connell told the Asheville Citizen-Times, presumably before tucking a new plug of chaw under his lip and gazing into the middle distance, “and I just can’t roll over any more.” As of press time, it was unclear whether O’Connell had any fucking clue how his own Representative advocated for the closure of his business.
If you’d like to hear more from Mr. O’Connell, you can see him over at Glenn Beck’s Internet Frothatorium. Like any rational small business owner, O’Connell has decided there’s nothing more he can do in North Carolina, so he’s in Texas playing tummy sticks with Glenn.
Top image: Flickr – Michael Sprague / Letter Image House.gov
