Paul Krugman: The Boehner Bunglers

The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic
consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the
radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in
their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier —
ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful
of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and
dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”