Like leeches for anemia

America, incredibly, has fallen again for the same old Republicans and their same old bullshit:

[M]y mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

There are two possible outcomes of the debt ceiling negotiations. Either President Obama gives the insane Republicans everything they ask for in their worst temper tantrum, or America will default.

Why would the results be any different? Republicans already know that they can kneecap the economy and not only escape all blame for their irresponsibility but in fact they can pin the blame on Democrats. For the simple reason that the American polity is sick, probably mortally wounded. The voters are balky, panicky, irrational. The media are by and large stupid and determined to pretend that stupidity has an equal call on our attention and respect, while intelligence and information are as despised as they were by jocks in middle school.

A default would shake our economy to the core. America derives huge benefits from the dollar and the T bill being the world's reserve. A reckoning on that score is coming anyway, but this would accelerate the world's departure to a broader basket of currencies, including the renminbi. Since the wealthy investor class would be inconvenienced (in their net worth if not in their daily lives), Obama will probably cave.

Thus again the middle class will suffer, the plutocrats or their lobbyists will buy $350 bottles of wine for the likes of Paul Ryan (R-austerity is for others), and the economy will go to hell.

Yet Americans, misinformed and goaded toward the right by a bought and paid for media, will vote for and scream for more Republican bullshit.