Why bother to listen anymore?

Megan McArdle describes her reaction to Obama and Boehner's speeches last evening: why bother? The speeches were not about how to get a deal both can live with, they were about who to blame the other side. Yet the PR battle is already over: the GOP has lost. She closes with this old Soviet joke:

An old man has been standing in line for bread for eight hours.  His feet hurt, his back hurts, and he is faint from hunger.  Finally, finally the door opens and the baker comes out.  He starts to salivate.  He fingers the rubles in his pocket.

"Comrades, go home," says the baker.  "There is no flour to make bread today."

Something in the old man snaps.  He has been waiting in these lines for decades, and he has had enough.  "This is ridiculous!" he shouts.  "I fought in the Great Patriotic War! I worked for forty years in the factory! Now you make me wait in line for eight hours when there's no flour?  You didn't know this eight hours ago? I spit on you, and I spit on the regime!" And he spits in front of the baker.

A man steps out of line behind him.  "Careful, comrade. You know how it would have been in the old days if you had said these things."  With his thumb and forefinger, he mimes a gun being fired at the temple.

Defeated, the man steps out of line and trudges home with everyone else.  He goes into his apartment and sits down at the table.  His wife walks in just as he pours the last of his vodka into a glass, and drinks it down in one gulp.

"Sergei, what's wrong?!" she cries, seeing the look on his face.  "Don't tell me they're out of bread!"

"It's worse than that.  Much worse." he says heavily.

"What could be worse?"

"They're out of bullets."