Governing by gun to the head of the Body Politic.

When everything is said that can be said about the debt ceiling debacle, the bottom line is that a small group of extremists who know little about governing, economics or history but who do know that they do not have the American people on their side,hyjacked our governmental system. These people are not smart enough to know how to debate and are not civil enough to follow the rules. We have known that they are dangerous and now they have proved it to the American people. This is not lost on all the folks who watched this unfold and wondered if they would be able to meet their modest expenses in August. They now know that the dangerousness of these people is not just some polital concept, it is up close and very personal. I think the Tea Partiers and their Republican enablers will be the ultimate losers in this.

itself doesn't concern me a whole lot. The fact that this debt-ceiling hijacking bullshit was being openly planned and discussed by Republicans back in November 2010 (first time I had ever even HEARD of a "debt ceiling"), and was not headed off at the pass, upsets me. Obama should not have ever allowed them to even entertain the notion that they could start using it as a negotiation tool. That was his big mistake--he should have repeatedly publicly denounced this tying of the debt ceiling to their agenda and should have said "clean raise or you are responsible for crashing the economy." Once you start playing the game with crazies, you will get whittled down. But, I do believe he understands that Teapublicans just want him out, and are indeed willing to crash the economy (and have hampered it every step of the way since 2009) to do so, and he takes that seriously. People who think he doesn't understand his opponents are wrong, IMO. It may be that he didn't feel his party had the message or the upper hand, and better to give in and lose some than court disaster. It would be very hard for any President to see his country go from a superpower to economically second-rate overnight--ON HIS WATCH. History may not remember the teabaggers, it'll remember what happened under the first black President.

I think they've set a dangerous precedent by holding the country's, and the world's, financial infrastructure hostage to their agenda.

Now they're holding our air transport system hostage to further their anti-union goals.

What's next? Are we going to experience one threat after another to essential government functions? Can a country function like this? This is not good government, it's extortion.

I hope that you're right and that the American people will reject these kinds of tactics along with their perpetrators.