Reflecting whole and uniform armies of journalistic assessment, Ezra Klein says of the debt deal:
[It] is another example of what happens when Congress can’t agree to act: Those in Congress who want action — and they are of both parties — manufacture crises in order to force it. It’s not that things don’t get done so much as that they get done in the most dangerous, insane and reckless way. And if that fails and they don’t get done, they trigger awful, unimaginable crises.
I have now read this, or something like this, in dozens of Beltway elegies. Congress' performance was the most dangerous, insane and reckless performance imaginable, except that it was theretofore unimaginable, and failure to execute the unimaginable would have triggered some other unimaginability.
Ponder the superlative logic. Congress proved its "way" to be the most dangerous, insane and reckless way. In short, it could ... not ... get ... any ... worse, for we had already arrived at the greatest danger, the most insane insanity, the supreme recklessness of the metaphysically reckless. Yet instantly, or so it invariably turns out in these journalistic laments, we had in fact not arrived at the ugliest peril, for something even more "awful" that other way lurked.
However that potentially triggered awfulness was indeed being imagined: detailed analyses and miscellaneous speculations of the coming devastation were rampant in newspapers' straight news and editorial sections and throughout the blogosphere and they regularly boosted cable news' ratings.
And I'd go so far as to say the potential was so awful, its reality, legislatively, would have self-cancelled within days, perhaps only hours.
But we withdrew from the "unimaginable" -- only to leave us with its permanency.