Debt Ceiling - Aaaargh!

If I start posting everything I can find explaining that the debt ceiling, unlike the "fiscal cliff," is a deadly serious situation with possibly catastrophic consequences for the world economy, this blog is going to get a great deal bigger -- fast -- and even more boring than it already is. I'm going to make a sincere effort to restrain myself from blowing up about every new Republican outrage on this subject.

I'll allow myself this one: Click here for an article by Steve Benen on msnbc.com entitled Political hostage taking should never be normalized. (I'm also getting sick and tired of the word "hostage," but there's no end to that in sight.)

Benen:

Let me say this as plainly as I can: congressional Republicans are threatening to hurt Americans on purpose. They can rationalize the need for the threat, and perhaps even justify to themselves why the threat has merit, but that doesn't change the basic fact that GOP officials know the debt ceiling must be raised, they know failing to do so would trash the full faith and credit of the United States and likely cause catastrophic harm to the economy, they know lawmakers in both parties routinely raised the debt ceiling 89 times without precondition between 1939 and 2010, and yet, they're going through with this anyway. There's nothing normal about this, and if the political establishment treats it as yet another partisan dispute, it will get this story wrong. In 2011, when Republicans created a brutal debt-ceiling, it not only damaged the country, it was the first time since the Civil War when an entire political party threatened, en masse, to do deliberate harm to the nation. And now, even after faring poorly in national elections, Republicans are poised to commit an act of political violence all over again.