Just for a moment, let’s think the unthinkable: What if we get to August 2 and there’s still no deal to raise the debt ceiling? How big a disaster would that be?
Somewhere between massive and apocalyptic, if an actual default were to ensue. That’s why I’ve never understood, throughout this whole endless tragicomic melodrama, how President Obama could possibly let that happen. It seems to me that definitive action — unilateral, if necessary — to prevent the nation from suffering obvious, imminent, grievous harm is one of the duties any president must perform. Perhaps the most important duty.
Or put another way:
I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensabale means, that government — that nation — of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? … I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it.
A.Lincoln 1864
Robinson again: “By any theory of the presidency, his responsibilities have to include stopping the country from hurling itself off a cliff.”
Somewhere between massive and apocalyptic, unless you listen to the folks that think The Flintstones is historical drama.
“Why bother?”, you asked. Because you are a bright spot in the blogosphere, always showing your readers good stuff, informative items, the neat stuff that is available to us. There is enough craziness going on in Washington, Santa Fe and here in Albuquerque to make us scream out the windows. I turned on the tv this morning to watch MSNBC and heard the snooty Peggy Noonan call President Obama a loser. My reaction was to become like Archie Bunker yelling at the tv from my easy chair.
Why bother? You point out the good when there are too many crazies doing the opposite. Thank you.