The purists that drove the right wing tide think they're within reach of their goal of shrinking the government, and are urging each other forward regardless of cost. In the process, they're ignoring political pros who thought the right could be controlled, and who now seem to know they need to chose country over party and survive, or party over country, and perish.
Looked at this way, there's really only one outcome here; the GOP will chose to survive and will survive, though chastened and diminished. Meanwhile, the extreme-right wing House freshmen who say they came to change Washington, don't care if they're re-elected, and have the votes to block any deal they don't like, will lose the former and get the latter.
The main driver of all this is the right's long determination to starve the beast and force the government to shrink, the evidence of how far they're willing to go being the fiasco over the national debt. The right's been telling us for 50 years that this was their goal; but it was so fantastic that nobody took them seriously.
Now, alas, we know better. I'll bet you all the money in my pockets that nobody over 30 ever imagined they'd see the day Republicans would ignore the interests of corporate America, but here we are. Not only are GOP freshmen in the House dismissing increasingly frantic calls from business to avoid default -- they don't even believe it would be a bad thing, much less the door to a global catastrophe.
