Consider the mortifying irony: The president of the most powerful and one of the more literate nations on earth has been reduced to holding press conferences in which he must explain--and explain, and explain--for the edification of that nation's most ignorant but also most internally powerful political faction that two and two make four and that bills accumulated really should be paid.
I didn't count the number of times President Obama used "simple" to explain our options on raising the debt ceiling--which consist of one--but it was a lot. And with each use, our mortification was intensified, as, no doubt, his was.
An even deeper irony came in the president's reminder that if it's "certainty" that business needs, as Republicans have solemnly preached to all for lo these many years, then threatening to pummel America's credit and shut down its government is an exceptionally improbable path to it.
Or, as the enlightened Founders would have put it, Well fucking duh!
Yet, here we are. The world's most powerful nation, highly educated and technologically sophisticated, and its leader must hold press conferences of such elementary emphasis as to maybe make preschoolers proud, but the body politic, not to mention the Founders, just downright ashamed.