Well, my goodness, the sky didn't fall after all!

So now the debt limit has been raised, as everybody knew it would be. I am reminded of a lunch at the Athens Olympia in Boston where a friend admitted that he never watched the Evening News, "Because there's no news in the News." True enough. Ninety percent of what the newsies get excited about is of no importance whatever.

That's not entirely true of the debt-limit debate. What happened was a compromise. Everybody is in favor of compromise, including the president of the United States, but what he means by compromise (what the New York Times means by compromise, what PBS and NBC and CBS and most of the newsies mean by compromise) is that Republicans should vote for Democratic priorities. That has worked for fifty years that I know of, with some minor exceptions during the Reagan presidency.

Then came the Tea Party, which for some reason the newsies present in lower-case letters. The Tea Partiers refused to capitulate, much as Mr. Obama has refused to capitulate over the past three years. (Because "I won.") The result of the fracas was--a compromise! The nutters on both sides are furious, as nutters are prone to be, though we only hear about the fury of the Democratic left.

Tough. You wanted compromise; you got compromise. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford