Category: Keepers

The latest version of a compromise takes us to a very familiar place. Essentially, we are postponing the tough choices, and returning to the notion of a bipartisan debt commission to impose some kind of long-term adjustment to taxes and spending that will help us avert fiscal catastrophe. All we're getting is a short term trillion dollars of cuts to raise the debt ceiling, and all that remains is how to ensure that the future commission's recommendations will be passed by the Congress.

And so the trigger. My view is that it should put real pressure on both sides. Some kind of tax hike on the successful should be included in the trigger if the commission's recommendations are not accepted. That – and that alone – puts pressure on the GOP to accept a big tax/spending Grand Bargain. For the same reason, I think cross-the-board entitlement cuts, raising of the retirement age and means-testing should also be in the trigger to force Democratic approval.

So much of this sounds exactly like what was promised long ago when Obama set up the Bowles-Simpson commission but failed to find a viable enforcing mechanism. What made that impossible was the Republican insistence on no new revenue sources at all. And that strikes me, alas, as still unresolved. I find it hard to believe that a serious bipartisan committee will not include some revenue increases, given the gravity of the crisis. And I cannot believe the current GOP, emboldened by its success in re-setting the debate, will be able to endorse that, especially if the alternative is only mandated entitlement cuts. Mandated tax hikes and defense cuts, in other words, must be in the trigger to avoid a replay of this any time soon. And the commission should be forced to report in six months.

If I may be allowed a smidgen of hope, it would amount to this. Despite vast polarization, and the most extremist GOP since the 1930s, the system has forced some kind of way forward. No one, in my view, comes off very well. Obama failed to grasp Bowles-Simpson and take the initiative in January. The Republicans have been spectacularly dogmatic over revenues, even when no sane person can really believe they are irrelevant to a solution that can command majority support. The bulk of the blame lies with the GOP, but Obama's excessive caution bears some responsibility as well.

They all failed. But there is still a chance that America can succeed in tackling this crisis. The question, to my mind, is whether the GOP nominee will run against such a deal or in favor of it. And if the campaign will be about the Grand Bargain or the options beyond it.

They did the last Democratic president; and they feel even more strongly that this one is illegitimate, despite his thumping majority in the last election. Here’s the scenario. The House GOP pushes for  completely unserious Boehner plan (including a balanced budget amendment) that they know will be vetoed; they then filibuster the Reid plan in the Senate, forcing Obama to invoke a 14th Amendment executive prerogative, which they will then turn around and impeach him for.

Far-fetched? I hope so. But every time you think you have reached the end of Republican extremism, they manage to move further out of the solar system. But it will take a huge effort by the propaganda machine on the right to make Obama’s decision not to default his fault, rather than the GOP’s. At this point, if the Reid plan cannot make it through the Senate on time or through the House at all, I’m beginning to believe that Obama should invoke this controversial power, given the extreme danger the stalemate is creating for both the US and the global economy, and challenge the courts to reverse it.

I suspect it would be popular among Independents. And allow Obama to regain the initiative over events dictated by a single faction in one party in one chamber whose fanaticism is only matched by their irresponsibility.

This really is an astonishing moment. They’ve ruled out sunsetting the ruinous Bush tax cuts; they’ve balked at a Grand Bargain; they’ve pushed the Democrats to produce a debt-ceiling plan that relies entirely on spending cuts … and they still think they haven’t won and haven’t made their point.

And the fracas is only getting worse. Think Progress finds that 25 Republicans have publicly committed to voting no on Boehner’s plan – but he can’t win with more than 23 defections. Rand Paul is calling John McCain a “troll,” after McCain called the Tea Partiers hobbitses; the two stars of the GOP candidates’ field, Palin and Bachmann, have urged a defeat for Boehner, backed by Rush Limbaugh; CATO is adamant:

The “cuts” in the Boehner plan are only cuts from the CBO baseline, which is an assumed path of constantly rising spending. If Congress wanted to, it could require CBO to increase its “baseline” spending by, say, $5 trillion over the next decade. Then Boehner could claim that he was “cutting” spending by $5.9 trillion, even though his plan hadn’t changed. You can see that discretionary “cuts” against baselines don’t mean anything.

Michelle Malkin is whipping up hysteria in her trade-marked way:

Remember: When Democrats say “balanced approach,” they mean it’s up to the GOP to perform the downward dog yoga pose.

Meanwhile, the establishment is threatening to throw one Tea Party member, Jim Jordan, out of his safe seat. No they just mean what the British Tories mean: some revenue increases are essential for the debt to be tackled seriously, alongside big spending cuts. Some Republicans are balking at continued funding for, yes, Pell grants in the Boehner bill. These elephants are stampeding in different directions at once. Maybe Boehner has a few poisoned darts to shoot. But maybe he doesn’t.

Well: they asked for it, didn’t they? Meep meep …

Sometimes it's just too rich. Bill O'Reilly wants to banish the entire ideological background of the mass murderer in Norway:

Breivik is not a Christian. That's impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the net, but he is certainly not of that faith.

Now let's concede one point here, a point I made myself yesterday:

The notion that Breivik is a "Christian fundamentalist" seems unfair to those genuine Christian fundamentalists who seek no power over others (except proselytizing), but merely seek to live their own lives in accord with a literal belief in the words of the Bible.

I think that's by far a better formulation of the argument. Why? Because it is obvious that Christians can commit murder, assault, etc. They do so every day. Because, as Christian orthodoxy tells us, we are all sinners. To say that no Christian can ever commit murder is a sophist's piffle. Did Scott Roeder stop being a Christian when he assassinated a man repeatedly demonized by Bill O'Reilly, George Tiller? Do the countless criminals who have gone to church or believe in Jesus immediately not count as Christians the minute they commit the crime? Of course not. What O'Reilly is saying is complete heresy in terms of the most basic Christian orthodoxy.

Mass murder? Of course, deluded Christians, infused with a sense of holy righteousness, can do such things. History is proof of that, from the Crusades to the Inquisition. We know also, for example, that countless Catholic priests raped and abused countless children in past decades and today. When they did so, did they instantly become non-Christians? O'Reilly's formulation is entirely that of a propagandist: circular, self-justifying nonsense.

And, of course, if you used this formulation for Muslim mass murder, you would have to argue that Osama bin Laden was not a Muslim at all, because Islam clearly abhors the murder of innocents. But somehow, one senses that O'Reilly, in that case, would want to look a little further (as he should). Then this lie:

The Christian angle came from a Norwegian policeman not from any fact finding. Once again, we can find no evidence, none, that this killer practiced Christianity in any way.

This is very carefully worded, the way clever propagandists – i.e. people uninterested in the truth – tend to write. What does "practice" Christianity mean? Are the only Christians church-goers? Do you have to go once? Or weekly? Is O'Reilly himself a Christian by his own definition? And, of course, the "Christian angle" did not just come from a cop. It came from the manifesto of the mass murderer himself. And here is the mass murderer's own definition of Christianity, also from yesterday's Dish:

I coined the term “Christianism” many moons ago to defend Christianity and the gospels from their political co-opters. And I think it’s indispensable in understanding the motivations of the terrorist, Anders Breivik (yes, I’ve given up my quixotic attempt to call him by the English name he gave himself on his manifesto).

One of the core messages of Christianity is a rejection of worldly power. The core message of  Christianism is, in stark contrast, the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others. And so the notion that Breivik is a “Christian fundamentalist” seems unfair to those genuine Christian fundamentalists who seek no power over others (except proselytizing), but merely seek to live their own lives in accord with a literal belief in the words of the Bible.

But Christianist? Breivik’s picture should accompany the term in any dictionary. Christianism is all about power over others, and it has been fueled in the last decade by its mirror image, Islamism, and motivated to fury by hatred of what it sees as is true enemy, liberalism. Both Islamism and Christianism, to my mind, do not spring from real religious faith; they spring from neurosis caused by lack of faith. They are the choices of those who are panicked by the complexity and choices of modernity into a fanatical embrace of a simplistic parody of religion in order to attack what they see as their cultural and social enemies. They are not about genuine faith; they are about the instrumentality of faith as a political bludgeon.

So the mass murderers of 9/11 visited strip bars not long before they yelled to Allah as they murdered thousands of innocents. And Breivik, in his methodical, sadistic murder of his political enemies, including their children, describes how he will manage to conduct the attack:

I’m pretty sure I will pray to God as I’m rushing through my city, guns blazing, with 100 armed system protectors pursuing me with the intention to stop and/or kill. I know there is a 80%+ chance I am going to die during the operation as I have no intention to surrender to them until I have completed all three primary objectives AND the bonus mission. When I initiate (providing I haven’t been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second, 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission. It is likely that I will pray to God for strength at one point during that operation, as I think most people in that situation would….If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past.

Notice the absence of real faith, which would recoil even at the very thought of killing innocents, but the pragmatic, cold-blooded use of faith as a psychological mechanism to enable mass murder. Bin Laden, we should recall, had been a very Westernized rich kid before he became a “believer.” Breivik – who killed a greater proportion of Norwegians than bin Laden did of Americans on 9/11 – has the same internal conflict. It is his fear of his lack of real faith that propels him to pragmatically embrace the psychological structure of religion to murder his cultural enemies, to reify “Europe” or “Christendom” or “the Church” in order to defend them and give some meaning to his life. He also needs to reify Islam into a purely political and cultural entity that exists solely as an existential threat to Western freedom and in which every Muslim is therefore suspect.

Like all such weaklings in the face of modernity, he is obsessed with sexual control of others and the sexual repression of oneself. He literally embraces a return to the mythic model of the 1950s, in which women remain at home, gays belong in the closet, and white Christians are the only kinds of Americans there are. He is obsessed with demography and reads at times like a parody of Mark Steyn, brooding over the out-breeding infidels. He is still angry at Betty Friedan.

A pseudo-believer, he nonetheless favors the arch-authoritarianism of the Old Catholicism rather than contemporary Protestantism (just like the atheist neocons). He loathes all transnational institutions and reads at times like an incarnation of Richard Hofstadter’s brilliant description of the “pseudoconservative”. He is also Christianist in the new way. There was a time when the extreme Christian right in America was anti-Semitic; now the extreme right is fanatically pro-Israel as a vanguard against the real foe, Islam. And not Islamism, but Islam. They have long since dispensed with that critical distinction, leaving George W. Bush’s scruples in the dust.

My point is this: this was about as far from an act of meaningless violence as you can get. It is an explicitly articulated, carefully argued conclusion from a mishmash of every current far right platitude out there. Breivik does not merely claim influence by someone like Robert Spencer, he quotes him and so many others at great length as part of his manifesto! It’s a pastiche of vast tracts of the far right blogosphere. None of this delegitimizes sane, vital critiques of Islamist intolerance, violence and ideology; none of it makes these cited ideologues and fanatics guilty of murder or in any way being accomplices to murder, or in any way connected to his crime. But it does seem to me to prove beyond any doubt that Christianism is indeed a phenomenon in its own right, and that its evolution into neo-fascist violence, like Islamism’s embrace of neo-fascist violence, is now something that cannot be denied.

Notice how unlike other crazed madmen, he does not end his killing spree by killing himself. Notice how he has not pled insanity; but has pled not guilty even though he concedes the horror of his actions. This man is extremely sane. Notice the justification:

Speaking at a televised news conference, [Breivik’s lawyer] Mr. Heger said that Mr. Breivik had acknowledged carrying out the attacks but had pleaded not guilty, because he “believes that he needed to carry out these acts to save Norway” and western Europe from “cultural Marxism and Muslim domination.”

He did what he did, knowing it was evil, because of a passionate commitment to a political cause, which has become fused with a politicized parody of one religion, and with a passionate paranoid hatred of another one.

If you think that contains no lessons for the United States, you might want to open your eyes a little more widely.

(Top photo: Self-portrait from Breivik’s manifesto. “Note the home-made insignia: “Marxist hunter – Norway – Multiculti traitor hunting permit”” reads the Wiki caption. Bottom photo: Flowers and condolences surround the outside of Oslo Cathedral after Anders Behring Breivik appeared in a closed court on July 25, 2011 in Oslo, Norway. By Paula Bronstein/Getty.)

You wonder sometimes, don't you? I assume that nothing I write ever really affects anything, largely because I'd be frozen in terror otherwise. But I don't think I'm that off-base anyway. It seems to me that Rupert Murdoch's alleged power – one deranged liberal hack called him the most powerful man in Britain since Churchill! – may be in danger of being exaggerated. But, of course, the exaggeration tends to refute itself. If most people in Westminster believe you're powerful, and act under that belief, you are. 

But what power has Murdoch exercized? The strongest argument is that his solid working class tabloid, the Sun, swung the 1992 election to John Major. I don't buy it. Murdoch's previous gift has not been dictating British politics, in my view, but in spotting winners a tiny bit before others, and jumping on their bandwagon. He saw – or his editors did – that in 1992, although the British public was sick of the Tories, they simply didn't think Labour was yet capable of government. The Sun encapsulated that mood with its election day headline: "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights". And Major won a shock victory (and had one of the most under-estimated premierships in recent history). But correlation is not cause and effect. Major won that election on his own.

(Personally, my favorite Sun headline of all time remains "FREDDY STARR ATE MY HAMSTER," in which a minor pop star was alleged to have done exactly that. It was completely made up, requiring the following priceless statement by Starr: "I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal.")

Murdoch followed up his 1992 coup with a switch from Tories to Labour six weeks before Tony Blair's landslide 1997 victory. Can anyone believe "it was the Sun wot won it"? Please. It was Blair wot won it – and the Murdoch press made a shrewd decision to throw in its lot with him. Murdoch's willingness to change his support was, of course, good politics and good journalism. It made him a media swing vote; and every pol pays more attention to swing votes than loyal ones.

All in all, it seems to me, Murdoch did have the power to destroy individual careers but not governments or political parties. The most shameful aspect – other than the criminal charges – of some of his tabloid editors was their occasional willingness to threaten and bully public figures with exposure of private affairs if they did not toe various lines. When this bullying was used to cow investigation of their own miscreance, that nasty bullying side became criminal.

But most bullies are not as strong as they would like us to think they are. What has happened recently is that the myth of the Great Machinator Behind The Scenes has been definitively debunked.

The emperor has had a wardrobe malfunction. And he looks old and small and wrinkly underneath.

Moments like the current one in Westminster are like sudden klieg-lights beaming down on otherwise crepuscular institutions. All the sharp shadows form; you see character tested; you see cliques revealed; you see the press divide. And in all this, you learn. One thing I’ve learned is that David Cameron is not to be under-estimated. His performance a short time ago today in the Commons was commanding. Yes, he has what the English call a “sticky wicket.” There seems little doubt to me that he hired NOTW editor, Andy Coulson, as an adviser precisely as the Murdoch press was indifferent to him and, mirabile dictu, Coulson, with his deep hackish connections, turned the situation around. There’s no getting around this – or the cool and more cunning hand of Chancellor George Osborne behind it. But the formula Cameron has adopted in defense of his position has been exactly the right one given the facts:

Mr Cameron said that if Mr Coulson had lied about phone hacking at his time at the News of the World then he should face “severe” criminal charges. He added: “If it turns out I have been lied to that would be a moment for a profound apology, and in that event I can tell you I will not fall short.”

He acknowledged that if he had known when he appointed Mr Coulson what he knew now, he would never have offered him the job. “Of course I regret, and I am extremely sorry about the furore it has caused. With 20:20 hindsight and all that has followed I would not have offered him the job and I expect that he wouldn’t have taken it,” he said.

“But you don’t make decisions in hindsight, you make them in the present. You live and you learn and believe you me, I have learned.”

Pitch perfect to my ears. And more candid than his Labour predecessors about the Murdoch swamp. One of the things least appreciated – but brought to light yesterday in the Murdoch hearings – is that Blair but most especially Brown were much, much closer to Murdoch than Cameron. Murdoch’s own remarks about his broken friendship with the former prime minister were almost touching yesterday. But Cameron definitely succumbed to – after first resisting – the fear of Murdoch’s power. He did what he had to do to get elected. It may not have been necessary. But it reveals the glint of ruthlessness in Cameron usually clothed in suave Etonian honor. The most successful scions of the English aristocracy – I think of my old friend, John Micklethwait who edits the Economist – have a brutal Thatcher-style spine to them. Cameron is in exactly that tough toff category. Behind the plummy vowels, there is steely ambition.

And to his credit, he has not run away from the decision to hire Coulson and has taken full, almost fulsome, responsibility for it. In the Commons, the opposition leader, the adenoidal wonk, Ed Miliband, has had a good scandal, but today he seemed somewhat deflated. There was a persnicketyness about his questioning that seemed somewhat small up against the prime minister’s candor and aggressive setting up of various inquiries. And for the first time, you could feel in the Commons a nagging sense that maybe they were getting carried away, and that most Brits really don’t care about this at all, and barely understand it. This is an elite scandal which the elite is obsessed by. It has not broken through to the public, except briefly over the Milly Dowler affair. If Miliband seems too petty, he will start losing. But Cameron has gone big and gone long. Smart politics.

Who is this man? I’ve spent much of the last fortnight asking people who know him. I need to ask some more before I get a real grip. But this is clear: his Etonian background is definitely part of him, and of a piece with the classic socializing in what is now being called the Chipping Norton set (an area in Oxfordshire where everyone in one clique in the British elite parties with everyone else). But what many do not see in Eton – the great public (i.e. super-private) school that has long dominated British public life – is that it does imbue many of its alums with a deep sense of social responsiblity.

In this sense, Cameron is much more the classic Tory PM than either of his two predecessors, working class John Major and aspiring bourgois handbagger, Margaret Thatcher. He is more MacMillan, with a touch of Baldwin. That he is so obviously posh has not pushed him outside mainstream middle class public opinion but has forced him to engage it more assiduously. The words one hears most often about him are “decent” and “sincere.” Of course those are not synonyms for completely clean. But with his current performance, total cleanliness is unnecessary. They’re all dirty in the Murdoch and tabloid drama, from right to left. But “the clock stopped on my watch,” as he put it. He seems quite prepared to put things right. Far from weakening him, I suspect his robust response to this crisis could help him.

From this side of the Atlantic, the great game of chicken now being played by the American political class with the debt ceiling is regarded as a sign that America – or rather, America’s Republicans – has gone completely insane. Everyone in Europe is desperately trying to stave off default – and here is the most powerful economy on earth actually hoping for it! When I explain the details of Obama’s last Grand Bargain – a debt reduction built on a ration of 3:1 spending cuts and tax increases – most Brits see it as a Cameron-conservative-style austerity measure. They simply cannot understand why the GOP doesn’t take what would for any sane conservative in any civilized country be a no-brainer.  I’m reduced to trying to explain what passes for “conservatism” in America is nothing of the kind – just know-nothing, fundamentalist, Manichean pseudo-conservatism. From this distance, the GOP seems even loonier, crazier and more reckless than they do stateside.

My own view, however, is that Obama badly bungled this by not embracing his current position in the State of the Union and pummeling the GOP with it for months. Bowles Simpson was his commission after all, and yet he dropped it like a stone and pandered to his left when he had a perfect moment to pivot to the debt question. Giving the GOP any credibility on debt by offering nothing of real $4 trillion substance until last week may well be seen as Obama’s greatest mistake in his first term. Now that he has finally offered it, his ability to maintain the high ground on a fair measure to tackle the deficit is much reduced from his January possibility. This is not a meep-meep moment. And it could easily have been, if Obama had shown, yes, courage sooner.

Nate Silver thinks both parties would take a hit if default occurs – something that Obama’s dilatory cowardice made possible. Brendan Nyhan counters:

Both sides would no doubt blame each other for the outcome and create elaborate stories about why the other side is to blame, which would then be reinforced and amplified in the press. Then more than a year would elapse before November 2012, and both sides would continue to blame each other for failing to adequately address the consequences of the default. In the meantime, many people will forget the details of what happened, but will know that Obama is the president and the economy is in bad shape. Under those conditions, how likely is it that people who would normally blame Obama for the poor economy will instead blame the GOP when they show up at the polls?

Agreed. On this score, leading from behind has been pretty much a disaster. And there is no longer much time to lead from the front.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference at the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House July 15, 2011 in Washington, DC. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

First up: full disclosure. I have written a weekly column for the Sunday Times for more than 15 years as a free-lancer on contract. I regard my editors there as among the best I have ever had; they have never tried to get me to write something I had any conflict with; and they have stuck by my own political evolution and conflicts over that period. I regard them as exemplary people – as are many who work under the Murdoch flag.

No charges of phone hacking have been made against the Sunday Times, to my relief. The reason for my own opposition to such practices – apparently not confined to the now defunct and affectionately titled News of the Screws – is rather simple. It’s cheating. Good reporting is hard work, which is why I have largely left it to those expert at its techniques. It requires certain acceptable levels of deceit (point taken, Ms Malcolm), guile, persistence, rudeness, cunning and the delicate art of interrogation. Investigative stories can take months to mature and, like new drug trials, can also disappear in a puff of smoke at the end. Sources can be elusive and untrustworthy and necessary. It’s one of the toughest tributaries of hackery and only occasionally the most fruitful.

But when you simply hack people’s phones to get a story, you have abandoned journalism. You have entered criminality. There is no actual journalistic skill required – just technical communications know-how and stenography. And the notion that the bulk of this is somehow in the public interest is preposterous. No conceivable public interest was served by knowing that Prince Charles once said he wanted to be Camilla’s tampon – and the exposure of such intimate details from phone hacking is simply criminal behavior designed to humiliate those more successful or famous than others. (Envy remains, I discover, the great British sin). I can’t express this better than the British comedian Steve Coogan in a recent appearance on Newsnight:

And it’s worth noting that the Great British Public were not exactly up in arms about Prince Charles’s fate – or that of any others – until the minute they realized that phone hacking might actually happen to them. It was only when members of the general public were targeted by this criminality that the outcry broke through the white noise. Before then, the News of the World was selling 2.7 million copies on Sunday out of a population of 70 million, and Rebekah Brooks was threatening many who dared question it with personal destruction as well. Imagine a US paper selling the equivalent – 11 million copies on a Sunday – and you see the scale of the sleaze, and the power. They were all in on it. And very few people in Britain can really be shocked at what we now know.

But shocked they pretend to be; as genuinely shocked as when they find out a famous footballer screws around on his wife. It really is a strange culture: completely unshockable and yet prepared to adopt utterly false shock to provide a patina of morality for what is essentially prurience and titillation. I’m sorry but the Great British Public is as complicit in all this as any member of their political/journalistic elite.

We have a potential catastrophe of national default, an event whose consequences are unknowable but which could quite easily wreck the US and global economies, profoundly damage people's savings, raise interest rates and destroy jobs for a very long time. In most countries, the goal of the entire political class is to avoid such a thing if at all possible. Greece is currently facing down riots in order to slash its deficit. Britain is entering a period of profound austerity. All of this pain is to prevent the worst possible crisis to hit a country: default. All responsible politicians understand this is something to be avoided at all costs. Conservatives especially see any weakening of the full faith and credit of sovereign governments or the EU as very destabilizing to growth and democratic stability.

So here we are in the USA, with our own awful debt crisis, and the possibility of default and one of the two major parties is saying effectively: bring it on. Even more amazing, it is the conservative party that seeks the collapse of the global economy if they do not get their way on every single thing.

Some sane Republicans (Coburn) are absolutely right in my view that spending needs to be cut deeply, broadly and permanently to get us back on track, that Medicare is at the center of the problem and that corporate welfare is at obscenely high levels. I favor a plan along Bowles-Simpson lines that would truly transform the long-term fiscal outlook, while treading a little gingerly in the next year or so.

But I am also an adult and understand that in the American political system, this kind of package has to win support from House, Senate and president to pass. There will have to be compromise. At a time, moreover, of extreme economic pain in many parts of the country, after a period in which the successful have become relatively richer than everyone else than at any point in recent decades, the sacrifice should surely be shared. You can do this by emphasizing many more spending cuts than tax increases – something I'd favor and something that the British Tories have put into effect. But it is simply insane to believe that the deal can be only tax hikes or only spending cuts and make it through the political process.

For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does. And when that fanatical faction was responsible for huge spending binges in the recent past, for two off-budget wars costing $4.4 trillion, a new Medicare benefit, and tax revenues at a 50-year low relative to GDP and tax rates below the levels of Ronald Reagan, this insistence is lunacy, when it isn't gob-smackingly hypocritical. I say this as someone who was railing against too much spending when these people were throwing money away like it was confetti. "Deficits don't matter," remember?

It seems to me there are two options the president can take. The first is what you are told to do when a criminal or terrorist holds a gun to your head. You surrender.

The point of economic blackmail is that it works. If you have a scintilla of public responsibility and you hold public office, you cannot allow default. And so you give them everything they want. You announce this while declaring you abhor the package but have to back it for the sake of the national interest in preventing catastrophe. You detail and expose the Republican priorities far more aggressively than in the past. You blame the performance of the economy entirely on them from now on out. And you run on a platform of shared sacrifice – of revenue-enhancing tax reform and tax hikes for millionaires. Then you run against the Republicans as hard as you can.

The second option is to bypass them, invoke the 14th Amendment, and order the Treasury to keep paying its debts because an extraordinarily reckless faction wants to destroy the American economy in order to save it (and pin the subsequent double-dip recession on Obama). Bruce Bartlett outlines the mechanism here. He has some other ideas for coping here.

What you probably cannot do is negotiate with economic equivalent of terrorists. What Cantor and Boehner are doing is essentially letting the world know they have an economic WMD in their possession. And it will go off if you do not give them everything they want, with no negotiation possible. That's the nature of today's GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover.

(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner participates in his weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill, June 23, 2011 in Washington, DC.  By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)