Why are you surprised?

The New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller is entitled, "Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees". It concerns the ongoing, and seemingly deadlocked, crisis over raising the debt ceiling.

“I never saw anything like this, and I never thought I would see anything like this,” said Laurence H. Meyer, a former Federal Reserve governor who has been fielding calls from worried hedge fund clients to his Washington research firm, Macroeconomic Advisers. “I never appreciated how dysfunctional our political system is.”

You didn't?

Where have you been, Mr. Meyer and the rest of you who profess shock that things have come to this pass?

The rhetoric that encouraged the far right to make its stand here and now has been blaring loud and clear from powerful voices in the media and behind closed corporate doors for thirty years. If you're surprised there are people who would seek a drastic solution to what they've been told is an apocalyptic calamity perpetrated by irrational, wasteful, contemptibly irresponsible political opponents, you're guilty of willful blindness.