Raising the debt limit: there there the big spenders go again--or jeapordizing our economic standing for political gain?

NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman wote an editorial about raising the federal debt limit, titled

To the Limit:It isn’t at all unthinkable that the battle to raise the federal debt ceiling could end in failure.

In the editorial, Prof. Krugman detailed the contest between the Democratic and Republican leaderships, faulting President Obama for not standing up to GOP extortion, as he saw it. My answer (which the NYTimes apparently rejected):

The question isn't what the billionaires' serviceable villains are up to. It's how they manage to keep getting elected by the very people they have most betrayed. After all, rank and file Republicans aren't profiting from their party's perfidy. They're losing. Big time. Then blaming that loss on the very people who are trying to save them.

H.L.Mencken said “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Put that message through a thousand well-financed bullhorns every day for decades, and many will ignore what little activity goes on across their cerebral cortices in favor of the chimpanzee brain always lurking below. There, where tribe trumps reason, the GOP has convinced half the country that the Democrats are not in the American tribe. They're alien occupiers not to be believed--actually not even to be listened to in the first place.

And when you try to counter slick, well-financed, utterly internally consistent (at the emotional level) propaganda with reason, you have to realize that what they hear bears very little resemblance to what you said. They will hear what their leaders have taught them to "hear" when Democrats speak: what they perceive as the enemy tribe trying to trick Real Americans into surrendering their precious body fluids.

Good luck with that.

FDR was able to win because he could match them at their own game. What I fear our president doesn't understand is that it is irrational to treat people as if they are rational.

It wouldn't hurt, of course, if the Democratic Party stopped telling blue-collar Anglos that they must make whatever sacrifices needed to accommodate the needs of our Latin neighbors to solve their overpopulation crisis by exporting it here, to either take their jobs or drive wages down to starvation levels, by people whose jobs are neither endangered nor diminished by the illegals.

That's how we play into the GOP's hands.