One of the best features of the "debt ceiling deal" is that no one seems to be able to agree who won or who lost. Maybe everyone won! Maybe everyone lost! Maybe we'll never know. One would imagine that it would be a useful thing to be able to say that someone definitively benefited from the summer-long fake hostage-crisis kabuki play we just endured, if only because now that we're facing a future of constant fake hostage-crisis kabuki plays substituting for a functional form of governance. But most of our nation's pundits and deep-thought-havers can't agree on who won.
This is, of course, clear evidence that the "debt ceiling deal" is actually so genius that mere mortals cannot hope to understand it without having their puny human brains scorched to a cinder by its divine ineffability. But like we once wrestled over the orbits of heavenly bodies, it falls to our best minds to ponder these great questions. As you'll see from this definitive sampling, they are of several minds on the matter:
Look, Obama TOTALLY Won The Debt Ceiling Fight:
"Obama is the Big Winner in the Debt-Ceiling Debate," by Francis Cianfrocca, RedState
"Floundering Obama aims for '12 miracle," by Michael A. Walsh, New York Post
"Obama Actually Won the Debt Ceiling Fight," by John Carney, CNBC
No, Obama Lost The Debt Ceiling Fight:
"The President Surrenders," by Paul Krugman, New York Times.
"Fine! Call My Bluff!" by James Taranto, Wall Street Journal
Hey, Did You Consider That Maybe Obama Both Won AND Lost?:
"Did Obama Get Rolled?" by Jonathan Chait, The New Republic
"Obama's Pyrrhic Defeat," by Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast
"Democrats will lose now. But they can win later," by Ezra Klein, The Washington Post
Enough Of The Zen Koans! The Point Is, The GOP Lost The Debt Ceiling Fight:
"US debt crisis: The Republicans have shot themselves in the foot," by Tim Stanley, The Telegraph
"Obama’s grand slam: Republicans fold as U.S. continues on path toward economic disaster," by Emily Miller, Washington Times
Well, Maybe The GOP Lost, But The Tea Party Won:
"How the Tea Party ‘hobbits’ won the debt fight," by Marc Thiessen, Washington Post
"A Tea Party Triumph," the Editors, Wall Street Journal
No, No...The Tea Party Says They Totally Lost, Too:
"Tea Party Sees No Triumph In Compromise," by Douglas A. Blackmon and Jennifer Levitz, Wall Street Journal
Of course, you might wonder if anyone bothered to ask if ordinary Americans won or lost. Here is everything the above articles had to say about that, verbatim:
Krugman: "It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status."
Chait: "The debt ceiling agreement is a horrible piece of legislation. It ratchets down already too-low domestic discretionary spending caps and imposes painful sacrifice on the middle class with little asked of the rich."
And that's it! The rest is horse race politics. This is too be expected, because people in the media do not actually know enough ordinary Americans to care about them or wonder how they are doing.
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