"They need to do their job," barked the president of Congressional trolls. If his daughters, 13 and 10 years of age, can get their homework done ahead of otherwise guaranteed disaster, then surely the grown men and women of high elected office can settle, on a timely basis, a debt-ceiling dispute that's been charging down the foreseen tracks for months.
Jesus, I pity him. Obama is now having to publicly scold and even ridicule the infantile, recalcitrant yokels of the United States Congress, just to get them to do their bloody homework, for which they draw government paychecks.
On the one hand American voters have the pronounced macroeconomic dimwittedness of Jim Demint, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and others, who have pooh-poohed projections of catastrophic ramifications of not raising the debt ceiling.
On the other hand Americans have the president of the United States having to plead the extraordinarily self-evident: that the debt ceiling is no "abstraction," and that "all the [negative economic] headwinds ... will get worse" if the ceiling is left unlifted. Plus, today the International Monetary Fund said in a report that "Failure to raise the debt ceiling 'soon enough,' along with too quick a cut in spending" poses a "severe shock" to the economy here and abroad.
The president says that, the IMF says that, virtually every economist with a human pulse says that, and still, the GOP obstructionists play games -- with dynamite.
It's a tribute to Obama's miraculous temperament that he doesn't explode more often.