Strangely comforting shutdown

We are now two days from a total shutdown of the US government.  I exaggerate.  Turns out, Obamacare will be going strong.  As will Medicare, Medicaid and Social security.  A lot of defense and "essential services" will continue unabated.  As will departments that have their own sources of revenue such as the postal service and possibly the patent office.  However, most of the rest of the Federal government will effectively shut down next Tuesday, that is unless the GOP relents and negotiates seriously with Obama - something that seems increasingly unlikely.

To explain why this is comforting, one has to understand what John Boehner's alternative proposal was.  At the moment, the GOP is essentially planning to shut down government, but not default on debt.  John Boehner was trying to get his extreme right wing to relent on government in exchange for holding the world hostage on the debt.  If the GOP actually went the debt route, we would be entering uncharted territories.  Never before has any major country, let alone the reserve currency for most of the world, defaulted on debt.  The consequences ... well we have no idea what would happen.  However, no sane economist believes it would be anything other than a catastrophe.

Faced with a choice between a global catastrophe and a US only crisis, a crisis seems almost a relief.  This article in the New Republic summarizes it well.  Here's how they put it:

"First, the lunatics in the House were so determined to stage a confrontation with Obama that they were willing to shut down the government and court a massive backlash in public and elite opinion. Then, in an attempt to save them from this fate, their heroic and noble leadership tried to persuade them to defer these impulses and refocus them on a confrontation (the debt limit) that would have far more destructive consequences, and (in the case of default) earn them still greater amounts of scorn from the public and the media. When the lunatics didn’t go for that, Boehner then tried to bribe them with a laundry list of fantasy items, akin to bribing a 15-year-old male with endless supplies of pizza, video games, and Internet porn. But the lunatics still didn’t go for it because they really wanted to throw their tantrum now, not later, and anyway they weren’t sure Boehner was serious about the pizza and porn. And so, in the internal GOP conflict between pre-modern zealotry and cartoonish levels of cynicism, the zealotry appears to be winning out, to the serendipitous benefit of the rest of us."