John Boehner, at news conference today:
Clearly we struck a nerve. The response from the White House, Democrats and the left has been panic and hysteria. For years, Washington has gotten away with kicking the can down the road on the debt and deficit without ever having to face the realities of the government’s spending addiction. While this may be hard for the Washington crowd to accept, those days are over.
In the words of The Hill and in striking contrast to virtually all the reporting done on this:
Boehner also forcefully rebutted claims that a delay in raising the $14.3 trillion federal debt ceiling would rattle the markets and threaten the economy. The markets, he said, would react more negatively if Washington failed to rein in spending.
The modern Republican Party is beginning to show its neoConfederate roots, and by that I mean, its resemblance to the old, antebellum, slaveholding Southern Democracy.
Throughout the sectional crisis of especially the late 1850s, and even more intensely throughout Abraham Lincoln's campaign and election, the Republican Party repeatedly assured the Southern Democratic Party that the Northern president would not interfere with its "peculiar institution."
About this, there was no question. Lincoln campaigned on a platform of non-interference, although he did protest slavery's expansion into new western territories. But as for Southern slavery, under Lincoln it would be intact, protected, Constitutionally guaranteed. End of story.
Southern pols, however, had realized the political benefits of simply ignoring pregnant reality. Southern "firebrands" demagogued the issue of Lincoln as abolitionist and Lincoln as determined enemy of the South, a man hellbent on corrupting the economic and political foundations of Southern culture. They twisted, distorted, molested and butchered Lincoln's words and promises and actual intent; they deliberately fired the hostilities of sectionalism so that they could benefit politically.
If the Sectional Crisis of the 1850s can be reduced in character to a few words, it would be those of ruthless demogoguery, mindless propaganda and a criminal negligence of the indisputable truth.
Southern politicos practiced all of these, because at heart, they simply did not care to preserve a democratically representative Union. Southern pols wanted whatever they wanted, and they wanted it all their way -- truth and reality be damned.