It would be nice to see the Republicans called out like this more often for being willing to sabotage their own government if they don't get their way or like the results of the last election. Chris Matthews called them out for just that during his "let me finish" segment on this Tuesday's Hardball: Obama, not the GOP, wants to keep government working:

Let me finish tonight with this.

I think the difference between the Democrats and Republicans is getting as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Watch how they do it:

President Obama wants to keep the government running. Republicans threaten to stop it. It’s relentless. The fiscal “abyss,” the “debt ceiling,” the “sequester,” the end of the “continuing resolution.” Different words, different deadlines, all detonate the same explosion. Threaten to crash the government if you don’t like the way it’s doing something if you don’t like who the American voter has elected.

Isn’t this what the Republicans did back in the old days? If you don’t like government—Guatemala, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Chile—just bring it down.

Guess what? The Republicans are now using that tactic here at home. If they don’t like who’s been elected, they find some way to undermine it, discredit its leaders, whatever it takes to destroy it. We’re using the ways of the old Cold War CIA to destabilize our own country.

Look at the impact these constant threats to shutdown the government are having on public confidence. It’s undermining it, making people forever nervous about the basic ability of America to even have a government.

Is that patriotic? I don’t think so.

Now if we could just get his producers to spare us from the sort of "fair and balanced" discussion he had on the same topic earlier in the program with Michael Steele laughing at the notion that his party behaves this way even though it's obvious he knows full well it's true, and freaking "Fix the Debt" Ed Rendell supposedly representing the left -- maybe we'd be getting somewhere.