Newsweek/Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky on the sickened confessions of former GOP staffer Mike Lofgren:
What can change it? Only a crisis (I mean an actual one) so deep and threatening that even NPR must call things what they are, and even some Republicans must say, "OK, there is such a thing as collective action, and we’d better undertake it."
I quite agree. In fact, I cannot see how anyone could not quite agree. Yet we just missed it. The debt-ceiling debacle was the ideal crisis -- the one in which "even some Republicans" would have said: This is madness, it cannot continue.
Having escalated from humiliating fiasco to authentic, existential crisis, defending a clean lift of the debt ceiling would have been President Obama's truly historic moment. It would have broken the back of the immensely corrupt, unforgivably disingenuous Republican Party, as so clinically described by the apostate Lofgren.
Doubtless there will be another opportunity for Obama. Next time, though, he we can't afford to miss it.