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This is a global player original podcast. Politics can take us to some very strange, very surreal places.

Taliban taunts Harry. That was the headline emblazoned across the male's front page

on Friday afternoon. They'd picked up on the story that of all people, the Taliban, had chastised

Prince Harry for his moral failings, for his claim in his memoir that he killed 25 Taliban fighters

during his tours of Afghanistan.

What a place we are in in the now endless Harry William story,

that it should be the Taliban claiming the moral high ground over a member of the British royal family.

And even stranger that the male should write it in such a way as for the reader to think that the male

thinks the Taliban are essentially right to say so. That's just how deep the rapids of the culture war

now run in this story. And then across the Atlantic, another institution in chaos. The United

States House of Representatives locked in a once-in-a-century event,

an inability for the Republican Party to do what nearly all their predecessors,

newly elected in the majority, have done.

Choose a leader, a speaker, who once in place will control the chamber,

allow them to start investigations, past legislation,

even to be sworn in as members in the first place. Now, on the face of it, these stories are far apart,

not just geographically, but they're both tales with a much longer pedigree. Both have fuses lit long

ago, the climax of something as much as a beginning.

And ultimately, when you really think about it, both are stories about institutional failure.

One, the royal family, still ricocheting from decisions and mistakes made four decades ago and since.

The other, the Republican Party, one of the two gears of American politics, unable to move, stuck in the sand,

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