The Nation’s Destruction – the Power of Magical Thinking: All the logic and rational argument promulgated against the Republican leadership about the manufactured crisis of raising the debt ceiling does not matter because the Republican leadership is shaking in its self-created Tea Bag infected boots. The Knownothing Tea Bag so called movement is made up of a minority of Republicans (many racist) in the country that wants the president to fail and wants to take down the nation with him. Many see this as a once-in-a-life-time chance to foment national and world-wide discord (Oslo is, indeed, ominous) as the means by which they will usher in their Christianist -- mainly white power -- state. Rational argument, no matter how well intentioned and infinitely correct, the opposition of madness will never by persuasion back down. It would not matter if Democrats offered 14 trillion in cuts with no revenue, this small group of Republicans representing the religiously intolerant and ignorant will, using Republican leadership as their mouth piece, consistently say no. They have hijacked the rest of the Republican Party who, I believe, would negotiate a compromise at the very least.

The president in his heart, I think, understands that those who will not vote to raise the the debt ceiling (which Reagan raised 17 times), in truth, want really to subvert the president and Democratic senatorial leadership and thereby watch the country implode. Many Tea Baggers hope the resultant chaos of this deadly never-waged-before game of financial chicken will take this country and the world down with it. They have not seen, until now, this ripe moment of intertwined world discord to confront the secular world they have always loathed. Their magical fantasy world will, they think, usher in the second coming of Jesus who will save the believers only and leave the rest of us to take up residence in hell. I suspect the hell to which they wish to relegate us is the here and now on earth.

Ridding or cutting our hard-won-over-decades social safety nets of Soc. Sec., Medicare and Medicaid will kill – yes kill – many. Moreover, ultimately, if it those programs are put in the hands of Wall Street gamblers and their Ponzi schemes it will put the final seal on our nation’s coffin. One can see how well Wall Street worked for us in 2007 and the many booms and busts it provided before that. The preponderance of wealth now sits oligarchically in the hands of a few and those few co-opt the parties with unlimited cash.

The middle and working classes get the boot and are relegated to the lower tiers of our economic order. Those at the top 2% simply do not care. The middle class minions who support Republican leadership do not understand that they will relegate themselves to this hell as well since they are mostly a part of our middle and working classes. Still many rejoice in the discord as the more divided, psychologically furious and sick the nation becomes the better to usher in their Christianist fantasy Jesus land and truly marry church and state exactly what our founders did NOT want.

Most all families and those we love – including Tea Baggers' families – depend upon our country's social safety nets to live. They will, though, succumb with the rest of us who depend upon these programs. In the final analysis we are ALL human. The only ones who will NOT be affected by anything, of course, are the wealthy of Wall Street who have managed to make oodles of bucks through our crisis while the rest of the country stagnates in a quicksand of lost financial worth and economic failure. The wealthy always manage to escape their self-made hells but the rest of us will not have a map or GPS device to escape this route of social discord, fracture and anarchy.

We must harness our own minions, who make up the rational part of our national discourse, to summon our forces against the ignorant and we must not allow this sad misguided minority the prevalence and power of their magical thinking to take our intelligence, our rationality, our president and our country down with it.