Fox regular and National Review editor Rich Lowry did his best to try to minimize the damage that would have been caused by another government shutdown on this Sunday's Media Buzz with Howard Kurtz. Kurtz actually opened his show by listing many of the people and agencies that would be affected had Republicans shut down the government again this week, but he let Lowry pretend that the damage would mainly be to a few tourists and not have much of an effect on most American's lives.

KURTZ: Rich, if the shutdown had happened as most of us expected, would Republicans have been blamed? And you don't have to take the media's word for it, Mitch McConnell said yeah, they would.

LOWRY: Yeah, they certainly would have been blamed, because, one, that's what the media tends to do. Two, you have Republicans on the right flank of caucus saying, we want a shutdown, so Democrats in the media can point to that, and you have Republican division.

So the whole formula was for Republicans to be blamed. I think Kevin McCarthy realized that and and did really the only thing he could do stop short of this break.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Republican rebels wanted a shutdown. It wasn't that they were trying to play... overplaying their hand, they wanted to see the government shut down. Why?

LOWRY: Some of them did.

KURTZ: Why?

LOWRY: Because I think they failed to learn the lesson of what happens. You have a shutdown. You put a big padlock on the Washington Monument. All the news stories, look at this disappointed tourist from Missouri who wanted to bring with her family into the Washington Monument, and then no one likes it, even their ordinary lives aren't affected, but no one likes it, and then you're blamed, and then you end up a week later or whenever it is having to back down anyway.

Kurtz corrected him, somewhat, but rather than confront Lowry directly, he did it in the way he framed the question to his other guest:

KURTZ: Well, Lucy, I would say some ordinary lives were affected because people living paycheck to paycheck don't get their paychecks for a while. Look, people don't like government in abstract, but when federal workers and soldiers aren't being paid, national parks shut down, air traffic controller training shuts down and border patrol agents don't get paid, they tend to get ticked off.

USA Today reported on the number of people who would suffer real damage if the MAGAs had their way with another shutdown, and it's sure as hell not just a few tourists at the Washington Monument: Which jobs lose pay in a government shutdown? What to know about military, national parks, TSA, more:

Potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans could have their jobs impacted as the deadline looms for Congress to pass spending bills to avoid a total government shutdown.

Funding expires on Sept. 30, and House Republicans are still divided on spending negotiations, with members of the House Freedom Caucus openly leveraging a potential shutdown to meet their demands.

If that were to happen, all “non-essential” federal agencies would close and their employees would be furloughed. Additionally, air travel and food inspections could be delayed, and even national parks could soon pause operations.

If a shutdown does happen, here are jobs that would be affected:

The article goes on to list the federal employees, state employees relying on federal funds, military and federal law enforcement personnel, TSA and air traffic controllers, the TSA training that would stop, national parks, furloughs at FDA, NIH, USDA, and subcontracted government workers that could lose wages altogether, and that doesn't even get into the ripple effects these would cause to other businesses who rely on those employees as their customers and the devastating effect on our economy as a whole.

But yuck it up, Rich Lowry, and let's hope they don't put us through this three ring circus again in 45 days.