Debt-ceiling "suspension": just another Tora Bora?

National celebration over the House's debt-limit suspension seems a bit premature and much too celebratory. John Boehner's incorrigible band of [insert plural form of preferred epithet here] have mostly bought themselves some invaluable time to regroup--time being a desperately needed strategic assist in the disoriented aftermaths of Election Day and assorted fiscal-cliff rumbles. Launching a major new front--now--was excessively ambitious and politically doomed; egads even the pin-striped nihilists understood that.

So with twitching and bloodied hands they scribbled a 90-day truce, whose termination roughly coincides with the opening of two other fronts: sequestration and government's continued funding. In brief, the triple threat is still alive--although how alive and well is anyone's guess. My objection, or perhaps more accurately my worry, is that the threesome is alive at all.

President Obama vowed to not negotiate over a debt-ceiling lift and he was both exactingly true to his word and in sweeping violation of it. Indeed, negotiate he did not; yet in agreeing to the House's petulant, irregular three-months-but-no-one-year proposal--and "[p]ostponing a crisis for 90 days," as the NYT editorial board reminds us, "does nothing to reassure markets, or businesses, or ordinary bondholders worried about their investments"--the president permitted House Republicans a kind of negotiated Tora Bora breakout.   

Progressive celebrants of the three-month debt-ceiling deal have declared it the end of Republicans' leverage. I haven't a clue as to why. I mean I know why they celebrate--they tend to do such things spontaneously--but why Republican postponement of a debt-ceiling crisis is logically commensurate with Republican cancellation of a debt-ceiling crisis is, I'm afraid, beyond me. I'd like to believe it, but my repeatedly confirmed belief in a godless, merciless, treacherous Republicanism is by now unshakable.

Wounded animals don't seek redemption. They seek only time. And they just got some.

Comments

[Peter G]

I love words games! Plurals eh? Well parliament of owls is completely out of the question. Theirs always murder of crows. That has a certain aptness. Does it have to use band? The only thing that springs to mind is the class Cestoda or as you might know them tapeworms. I gotta tell you the description is apt: "The body is whitish in colour, divided into the anterior scolex, followed by a short neck and a highly extended body proper called the strobila." Short neck, extended body? Nailed it!

[Peter G]

Effing auto-correct! There's not theirs.

[Janicket]

How about "band of bothers"?

[Robert Lipscomb]

While I share PM's trepidations about the intensions of the GOP, I question their ability to execute. More and more, Obama just seems so much bigger than the whole GOP. I came away yesterday with the same opinion about Hillary. Those GOP senators and congressmen had every intension of vanquishing her, but they could not execute.

[Susan Zoon]

The hostage takers were getting creamed in public opinion so they used this sleight of hand to make the problem disappear for a couple of months. They need to have the MSM shut up about it already, and this they accomplished. Bibbity... Bobity.. BOO! They killed the meme.
I don't see how resurrecting the corpse helps them.

[Turgidson]

Either the progressive celebrants are right and the GOP has admitted they won't shoot the hostage...in which case they won't get taken seriously if they try this shit again, or they think a few months down the road Obama's approval ratings will erode and they'll have more room to pull this stunt successfully without getting told to sit down and STFU by nearly everyone with a pulse, even their allies.

If I had any shred of belief that the GOP was capable of sanity, I'd be certain it was the former. I don't, so I suspect the latter.