The extremists want to burn the house down

Contrary to what you might think from this blog, I'm not ignoring the Congressional impasse on raising the debt ceiling. I just haven't seen any developments that merit comment, or at least merit comment that a million others haven't written.

Even the bipartisan plan proposed by six senators isn't going to go far, if the behavior of the bulk of House Republicans is any indicator. The Senate might approve the plan, and House Speaker Boehner might agree with it, but Tea Party fiscal extremism holds most if not all the rest of House Republicans in its thrall. Boehner, their nominal leader, can't get them to pull in his direction.

I wonder if those representatives genuinely believe that holding a gun to our nation's collective head is the right thing to do, fiscally speaking. I think a lot of them do, especially those newly elected, who have no experience with government.

These ideologues don't care that we got into our current predicament over a long period of time. They don't care that the responsible way to get out of it will require a long time, too. They've got a full head of steam, they're keeping one another's spirits up, they're convinced they're on the side of the angels. No compromise like that proposed by the Senate's Gang of Six is going to satisfy them. They want to impose their drastic and unrealistic form of fiscal discipline, and they won't settle for anything less.

They don't trust what people who know better, including most old Washington hands, are telling them the fallout will be. They don't trust facts and they don't believe the country and its fiscal state are as complex as they have been described.

These fiscal extremists will learn the hard way that they're catastrophically wrong. Unfortunately, they're going to make the rest of us suffer the consequences.

That a lot of those who will suffer also happen to be those who elected these geniuses to the House is some small comfort. I only hope the blinkered masses who fell under the Tea Party's simplistic sway will come to realize that the tea is unpalatably bitter.