The main answer, which only the most pathologically "balanced" reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, the G.O.P. has become "an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
But there's one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they're also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect - the truly incompetent can't even recognize their own incompetence - reigns supreme.
Comment: It's probably safe to say the Dunning-Kruger effect is not confined to Conservatives.
To see what I'm talking about, consider the report in Sunday's Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects - the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others - plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.
This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama's signature domestic achievement. You'd have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. - as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn't seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.
Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn't tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.
Comment: Obama will get his "legacy" project, because it continues the rip-off of the American people. The only beneficiaries will be Big Pharma, the private insurance industry, and Big Business, who will cut workers' hours to avoid having to pay into the scam.
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