A young man enters a public place-a school, a shopping mall, an airport-carrying a small arsenal. He begins killing people at random. He has no demands, and no one is spared. Eventually, the police arrive, and after an excruciating delay as they marshal their forces, the young man is brought down.

This has happened many times, and it will happen again. After each of these crimes, we lose our innocence-but then innocence magically returns. In the aftermath of horror, grief, and disbelief, we seem to learn nothing of value. Indeed, many of us remain committed to denying the one thing of value that is there to be learned.

After the Boston Marathon bombing, a journalist asked me, "Why is it always angry young men who do these terrible things?" She then sought to connect the behavior of the Tsarnaev brothers with that of Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza. Like many people, she believed that similar actions must have similar causes.

But there are many sources of human evil. And if we want to protect ourselves and our societies, we must understand this. To that end we should differentiate at least four types of violent actor.

1. Those who are suffering from some form of mental illness that causes them to think and act irrationally. Given access to guns or explosives, these people may harm others for reasons that wouldn't make a bit of sense even if they could be articulated. We may never hear Jared Loughner and James Holmes give accounts of their crimes, and we do not know what drove Adam Lanza to shoot his mother in the face and then slaughter dozens of children. But these mass murderers appear to be perfect examples of this first type. Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter, is yet another. What provoked him? He repeatedly complained that he was being bombarded with "ultra low frequency" electromagnetic waves. Apparently, he thought that killing people at random would offer some relief. It seems there is little to understand about the experiences of these men or about their beliefs, except as symptoms of underlying mental illness.

2. Prototypically evil psychopaths who feel no empathy for others and may even derive sadistic pleasure from making the innocent suffer. These people are not delusional. They are malignantly selfish, ruthless, and prone to violence. Our maximum-security prisons are full of such men. Given half a chance and half a reason, psychopaths will harm others-because that is what psychopaths do.

It is worth observing that these first two types trouble us for reasons that have nothing to do with culture, ideology, or any other social variable. Of course, it matters if a psychotic or a psychopath happens to be the head of a nation, or otherwise has power and influence. That is what is so abhorrent about North Korea: The child king is mad, or simply evil, and he's building a nuclear arsenal while millions starve. But even here, very little is to be learned about what we-the billions of relatively normal human beings struggling to maintain open societies-are doing wrong. We didn't create Jared Loughner (apart from making it too easy for him to get a gun), and we didn't create Kim Jong-il (apart from making it too easy for him to get nuclear bombs). Given access to powerful weapons, such people will pose a threat no matter how rational, tolerant, or circumspect we become.

3. Normal men and women who cause immense harm while believing that they are doing the right thing-or while neglecting to notice the consequences of their actions. These people are not insane, and they're not necessarily bad; they are just part of a system in which the negative consequences of ordinary selfishness and fear can become horribly magnified. Think of a soldier fighting in a war that may be ill conceived, or even unjust, but who has no rational alternative but to defend himself and his friends. Think of a boy growing up in the inner city who joins a gang for protection, only to perpetuate the very cycle of violence that makes gang membership a necessity. Or think of a CEO whose short-term interests motivate him to put innocent lives, the environment, or the economy itself in peril. Most of these people aren't monsters. However, they can easily create suffering for others that only a monster would bring about by design. This is the true "banality of evil"-whatever Hannah Arendt actually meant by that phrase-but it is worth remembering that not all evil is banal.

4. Those who are moved by ideology to waste their lives in extraordinary ways while doing intolerable harm to others in the process. Some of these belief systems are merely political, or otherwise secular, in that their aim is to bring about specific changes in this world. But the worst of these doctrines are religious-whether or not they are attached to a mainstream religion-in that they are informed by ideas about otherworldly rewards and punishments, prophecies, magic, and so forth, which are especially conducive to fanaticism and self-sacrifice.

Of course, a person can inhabit more than one of the above categories at once-and thus have his antisocial behavior overdetermined. There must be someone somewhere who is simultaneously psychotic and psychopathic, part of a corrupt system, and devoted to a dangerous, transcendent cause. But many examples of each of these types exist in their pure forms.

For instance, in recent weeks, a spate of especially appalling jihadist attacks occurred-one on a shopping mall in Nairobi, where non-Muslims appear to have been systematically tortured before being murdered; one on a church in Peshawar; and one on a school playground in Baghdad, targeting children. Whenever I point out the role that religious ideology plays in atrocities of this kind-specifically the Islamic doctrines related to jihad, martyrdom, apostasy, and so forth-I am met with some version of the following: "Bad people will always do these things. Religion is nothing more than a pretext." This is an increasingly dangerous misconception to have about the human mind.

Here is my pick for the most terrifying and depressing phenomenon on earth: A smart, capable, compassionate, and honorable person grows infected with ludicrous ideas about a holy book and a waiting paradise, and then becomes capable of murdering innocent people-even children-while in a state of religious ecstasy. Needless to say, this problem is rendered all the more terrifying and depressing because so many of us deny that it even exists.

To imagine that one is a holy warrior bound for Paradise might seem delusional, but we live in a world where perfectly sane people are led to believe such floridly crazy things in the name of religion. This is primarily a social and cultural issue, not a psychological one. There is no clear line between what members of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and al Shabab believe about Islam and the "true" Islam. In fact, these groups have as good a claim as any to being impeccable Muslims. This presents an enormous threat to civil society, which apologists for Islam and secular liberals can now be counted upon to obfuscate. A tsunami of stupidity and violence is breaking simultaneously on a hundred shores, and people like Karen Armstrong, Reza Aslan, Juan Cole, John Esposito, and Glenn Greenwald insist that it's a beautiful day at the beach. Their determination that "moderate" Islam not be blamed for the acts of "extremists" causes them to deny that genuine (and theologically justifiable) religious beliefs can inspire psychologically normal people to commit horrific acts of violence.

For weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing, we seemed determined to remain confused about the motives of the perpetrators. Had they been "radicalized" by some nefarious person, or did they manage it themselves? Did Tamerlan, the older brother, have brain damage from boxing? Were his dreams dashed by our immigration laws? Experts on terrorism took to the airwaves and gave their analysis: These young men behaved as they did, not on account of Islam, but because they were "jerks" and "losers."

Or was it just politics, with religion as a pretext? The New York Times reported that the Tsarnaev brothers were "motivated to strike against the United States partly because of its military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan." Many people seized on this as proof that U.S. foreign policy was to blame. And yet the only plausible way that Chechens coming of age in America could want to murder innocent people in protest over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be for them to accept the Islamic doctrine of jihad. Islam is under attack and it must be defended; infidels have invaded Muslim lands-these grievances are not political. They are religious.

The same obscurantism arose in response to the Woolwich murder-when two jihadists butchered a man on a London sidewalk while shouting "Allahu akbar!" Their actions were repeatedly described as "political"-and the role of Islam in their thinking was reflexively discounted. Why political? Because one of the murderers spoke of British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq invading "our lands" and abusing "our women." Few seemed to wonder how a Londoner of Nigerian descent could feel possessive about Afghan and Iraqi lands and women. There is only one path through the wilderness of bad ideas that reaches such "political" concerns: Islam.

Take a moment to consider the actions of the Taliban gunman who shot Malala Yousafzai in the head. How is it that this man came to board a school bus with the intention of murdering a 15-year-old girl? Absent ideology, this could have only been the work of a psychotic or a psychopath. Given the requisite beliefs, however, an entire culture will support such evil. Malala is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She is an extraordinarily brave and eloquent girl who is doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do-stand up to the misogyny of traditional Islam. No doubt the assassin who tried to kill her believed that he was doing God's work. He was probably a perfectly normal man-perhaps even a father himself-and that is what is so disturbing. In response to Malala's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, a Taliban spokesman had this to say:

"Malala Yousafzai targeted and criticized Islam. She was against Islam and we tried to kill her, and if we get a chance again we will definitely try to kill her, and we will feel proud killing her."

The fact that otherwise normal people can be infected by destructive religious beliefs is crucial to understand-because beliefs spread. Until moderate Muslims and secular liberals stop misplacing the blame for this evil, they will remain part of the problem. Yes, our drone strikes in Pakistan kill innocent people-and this undoubtedly creates new enemies for the West. But we wouldn't need to drop a single bomb on Pakistan, or anywhere else, if a death cult of devout Muslims weren't making life miserable for millions of innocent people and posing an unacceptable threat of violence to open societies.

Malala did not win a Nobel prize this week, and it is probably good for her that she didn't. She absolutely deserved it-far more than several recent recipients have-but this recognition would have made her security concerns even more excruciating than they probably are already. Her nomination is said to have noticeably increased anti-Western sentiment in Pakistan-a fact that deserves some honest reflection on the part of Islam's apologists. If for nothing else, we can be grateful to the Taliban for reminding us of what so many civilized people seem eager to forget: This is both a war of ideas and a very bloody war-and we must win it.
(c) 2013 Sam Harris is the author of "The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" and is the co=founder of The Reason Project, which promotes scientific knowledge and secular values. Follow Sam Harris on Twitter.

WHEN RABBI Ovadia Yosef first appeared on the national scene, I heaved a deep sigh of relief.

Here was the man I had dreamed of: a charismatic leader of oriental Jews, a man of peace, a bearer of a moderate religious tradition.

"Rabbi Ovadia," as everybody called him, who died this week at the age of 93, was born in Baghdad, came to Palestine as a boy of 4, gained huge respect as a religious scholar. During the 1948 war he was the chief rabbi of Egypt, later he became the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel. When his appointment was not renewed, as a result of some obscure political intrigue, he founded a new political party, Shas, which quickly became a force in Israeli politics.

He first attracted my attention when, contrary to most other prominent rabbis, he decided that Jewish religious law, the Halakha, allows giving up parts of Eretz Israel for the sake of peace. The "saving of lives" takes precedence.

BEFORE WE proceed, let's define some terms. "Sephardic" and "oriental" are often confused. But they are not quite the same.

Sepharad means Spain. Sephardic Jews are the descendents of the Jews who were expelled from Spain by their Most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492. Almost all of them shunned Christian anti-Semitic Europe and settled in countries under benevolent Muslim rule, from Morocco to Bulgaria.

The Ottoman Empire was based on a system of "millets", religious-ethnic communities which governed themselves under their own leaders, laws and traditions. The Jews throughout the empire were governed by the Hakham Bashi, the chief rabbi, who was, of course, a Sephardi. This was a secular appointment – in Jewish law there is no chief rabbi, no Jewish pope. All rabbis are equal, every Jew can follow the rabbi of his choice.

When the British took over, they were prevailed upon to appoint an Ashkenazi chief rabbi too. Since then we have two chief rabbis in this country, one Sephardi and one Ashkenazi, each upholding the traditions of his community.

However, the great majority of Jews from Islamic countries are not Sephardis. Nowadays they prefer to be called "Mizrahim" (eastern, oriental). Still, the terms Sephardi and Oriental overlap and have come to mean more or less the same.

THE NUMBER of people who took part in the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia has been estimated at 800 thousand – more than the total Jewish population in the country on the day the State of Israel was founded. Even assuming that this number is vastly overblown, the event was extraordinary. Jerusalem was practically blocked, the car bearing the body could hardly reach the cemetery.

All these hundreds of thousands, all male, were wearing the "uniform" of orthodox Jews – black garments, white shirts, big black hats. Many were weeping and moaning. It bordered on mass hysteria.

The eulogies of religious and secular leaders and commentators were limitless. He was called the greatest Sephardi Jew of the last 500 years, a "Great in the Torah" whose teachings would echo for centuries to come.

I must confess that I have never quite understood his greatness as a thinker, religious or otherwise. He always reminded me of what Yeshayahu Leibowitz once told me: that the Jewish religion had died 200 years ago, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell of rituals.

Rabbi Ovadia wrote 40 books of judgments and interpretations of religious law. While Ashkenazi rabbis generally tend to make it harder to comply with religious injunctions, Yosef tended to make it easier. In this he followed Oriental tradition, which was always much more moderate (as was Islam, until recently).

Yosef allowed widows of fallen soldiers to marry again (a complicated procedure under the Halakha). He decided that the Ethiopian Falashas were Jews, and thereby enabled them to come to Israel under the Law of Return. In innumerable individual cases, he made it easier for people to evade stringent restrictions. Since in Israel large areas of private affairs, such as marriage and divorce, are ruled by religious law administered by rabbis, this was very important for secular people, too.

But a profound thinker? A modern sage? I have my doubts. As one commentator dared to point out, the new pope has, in a few months, done more to change the theological and social outlook of his church than rabbi Ovadia in his lifetime. Reform Judaism has done far more to modernize Judaism than Yosef.

BUT MY initial appreciation of and final disappointment with the rabbi does not concern religious questions.

Rabbi Ovadia was a towering figure in Israeli politics. Almost half of all Jewish Israeli citizens are of oriental origin. Until his appearance, this was an underprivileged class, remote from the centers of power, often humiliated, quite disunited. All attempts to turn them into a political force failed miserably.

And than the rabbi came. He founded a powerful party that often served as the arbiter of Israeli politics. He gave the Orientals back their lost dignity. He united them. It was a huge achievement.

But for what? I had hoped that once the Oriental Jews regained their self-respect, they would remember their past, the Golden Age of Jewish-Muslim cooperation in medieval Spain, when Jewish poetry flourished in the Arabic language, when the great religious thinker Moses Maimonides was the personal physician of Saladin, the Muslim leader who vanquished the Crusaders.

In this hope I chose Yosef's protege and political standard-bearer, Aryeh Deri, as Man of the Year for my news magazine at the tender age of 29. Like his master, Deri, born in Morocco, was a man of peace and openly advocated a settlement with the Palestinians.

But the dream evaporated. The Shas party became more and more right-wing and supported extreme anti-Arab policies. The Rabbi, a great expert in Arabic and Hebrew curses, cursed the Arabs as much as he did his Jewish opponents. (Once he announced that on the day of Shulamit Aloni's death there would be a feast. Aloni, a leftist leader, did not feast on the day of Yosef's death.)

There are many reasons – psychological and sociological – for the Oriental community becoming anti-Arab and anti-peace. It's not only Yosef's and Deri's fault. But they did not do anything to counteract it. On the contrary, they ran with the crowd, accelerating the process.

Rabbi Ovadia ruled the Shas party like a pope, anointing and deposing its leaders at will. The party has no democratic institutions, no internal elections. The Rabbi made all decisions himself. By joining the anti-Arab chorus, he committed a grave sin – though he never repealed his judgment allowing the giving up of occupied territories to save lives.

BEING THE party of the downtrodden, it could have been expected that Shas would at least be the leader of social protest.

And indeed, Rabbi Ovadia and his underlings talked endlessly about the plight of the Oriental masses, the poor and disabled. But in real life, they did absolutely nothing to alleviate that plight by government policy, social reform, strengthening the welfare state and such. Indeed, their opponents accused them of intentionally keeping their electorate in ignorance and poverty, so as to keep them in a state of dependency.

As a matter of fact, Ovadia and his party used their considerable political power of extortion to extract from the government immense amounts of money for their independent educational system, and for nothing else. This system extends from kindergarten to higher yeshivot. In them nothing is taught but holy texts, rather like Muslim madrassas. Their graduates are unfit to join the labor force. Of course they do not serve in the army.

The day after the funeral, when Binyamin Netanyahu made his condolence visit to the family, the sons did not talk with him about peace or social reform. They talked only of the evil design to make their youngsters serve in the army.

Malicious tongues speak about the Yosef family's control of a huge private economic empire, based on the kosher-certification industry. Admirers of Rabbi Ovadia insisted on having their food certified as strictly kosher by persons trusted by him – for a price, of course. No one knows how much capital has been amassed by this Yosef family empire.

FOR NON-ORTHODOX Jewish Israelis, who are still the majority, Rabbi Ovadia was an eccentric, rather endearing, personality.

Television loved his way of affectionately slapping the faces of all his visitors, high or low. His curses have become part of folklore. (Once he called Netanyahu a "blind goat.")

His dress made him distinctive. Even after he was dismissed from the post of Sephardic Chief Rabbi, he insisted to the end on wearing the gold-braided Turkish uniform of that office.

Like most leaders of this type, he leaves no successor. There is no second Rabbi Ovadia, and there will not be for a long time. To build authority on personal leadership, charisma and erudition takes decades. No candidate is in sight. Even the survival of the Shas party under Deri is not assured.

For me, it is a sad story. Israel is crying out for a great Sephardic leader, able to mobilize the masses for peace and social progress.

The clock is ticking, we are told, on the "good faith and credit" of the United States government, which might technically be unable to pay its bills after October 17 if the two corporate parties don't make a deal on the debt limit. Congressional Republicans and the White House are "playing Russian roulette with the global economy," says an editorial in the Dallas Morning News, warning of impending "economic Armageddon" as financial markets "crater," the economy stalls and interest on future federal borrowing skyrockets.

Given that capitalism has entered a terminal stage of acute and escalating crises, the Dallas editorialists may be right; anything could set off another spasm of financial mayhem in a system that is ever more unstable. However, it is the "markets" - a euphemism for the financial capitalist class - that are the ultimate source of instability, the folks who play Russian roulette 24-7 and have dragged humanity to a place where an actual Armageddon is only a twirl of the chamber away. In this game, everybody's head is in play.

It is proper that the corporate press speak of the impending fiscal threat - a minor one, in the maelstrom of crises that beset the system - in gambling terms. An increase of interest rates by a few basis points (fractions of a percent) on trillions of borrowed dollars amounts to quite a chunk of public money, to be paid directly into the accounts of these very same private "markets" that are supposedly biting their nails with anxiety over the budget. The Dallas Morning News and its fellow corporate propaganda spores spread the myth that the "markets" (bankers, hedge funds, etc.) crave stability, when the vital statistics of the real world of finance capitalism scream the opposite.

The Lords of Capital (the "markets") are pure gamblers who have transformed the global financial marketplace into a machinery of perpetual uncertainty, in which all the wealth of the world is bet many times over by people who don't actually own it, in a casino whose operators scheme against each other as well as their patrons, most of whom are not even aware that they are in the game - much less, that it is Russian roulette.

The notional value of derivative financial instruments is now estimated at $1.2 quadrillion - that is, one thousand two hundred trillion dollars. This statistic is fantastic in every sense of the word, amounting to 16.7 times the Gross World Product, which is the value of all the goods and services produced per year by every man, woman and child on the planet: $71.83 trillion. Derivatives are valued at six times more than the total accumulated wealth of the world, including all global stock markets, insurance funds, and family wealth: $200 trillion. The great bulk of known derivative deals are held by banks that are considered too big to be allowed to fail, with the top four banks accounting for more than 90 percent of the exposure: J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs.

We are told that derivatives are simply bets between knowledgeable partners - hedges against loss - and that every time one of these financial institutions loses, another gains, so that there is no net loss or threat of global collapse. But that's a lie. Never in the history of the world has finance capital so dominated the real economy, and only in the past two decades have derivatives been so central to finance capitalism. The players do not know what they are doing, nor do they care. The meltdown of 2008 was caused primarily by derivatives, requiring a bailout in the tens of trillions of dollars that is still ongoing, with the Federal Reserve buying up securities that no one would purchase - that is, bet on - otherwise. Yet, the universe of derivatives deals has grown much larger than in 2008, effectively untouched by President Obama's so-called financial reforms.

The casino has swallowed the system. The sums the players are betting are not only far larger than the value of the rest of their portfolios, but six times larger than the combined assets of every human institution and family on Earth, and almost 17 times bigger than the worth of humankind's yearly output. Even if the whole planet were offered as collateral, it could not cover Wall Street's bets.

"Detroit has been rendered a failed city by the full range of derivatives and securitization." The events of 2008 demonstrated that derivatives collapses, like other speculative financial events, behave as cascades of consequences, rather than orderly "resolutions." Derivatives deals infest or overhang every nook and cranny of the U.S. and other "mature" economies, poisoning pension systems and municipal finance structures. Detroit has been rendered a failed city by the full range of derivatives and securitization. When the casino is the economy, everyone is forced to play, and the poor go broke first.

Reformers of various stripes tell us that derivatives can either be regulated to a less lethal scale or abolished, altogether, while leaving Wall Street otherwise intact. That's manifestly untrue. Finance capital creates nothing, reproducing itself through the manipulation of money. The derivatives explosion occurred because Wall Street needed a form of "fictitious" capital to continue posting ever higher profits, and ultimately, fictitious portfolios full of tradable bets. Derivatives deals are the ultimate expression of financial capitalism: they are primarily bets on transactions, rather than investments in production. The rise of derivatives signals that capitalism has run its course, and can only do further harm to humanity. The derivatives economy - all $1.2 quadrillion of it - is the last stage of capitalism.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." ~~~ Abraham Lincoln

At exactly 10:11 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday night, the 218th vote required to forestall the wrath of stupid people was cast in the US House of Representatives.

Whoop de freakin' do.

I honestly don't know where to begin. The breadth and depth of this land mass of abject Fail is genuinely breathtaking. The right-wing trucker protesters coming to "arrest" Congress who were chased off by a traffic cop. The Confederate flags waved in front of the White House that houses a Black family, folded into a veteran's protest that got co-opted by Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, who yowled about not using veterans as pawns even as they shoved veterans out of the way in order to get in front of the red lights of the news cameras.

Heritage Action, the activist wing of the Heritage Foundation, has been the hood ornament of the "Defund Obamacare" movement since President Obama won re-election in 2012. The final attempt by House Speaker John Boehner earlier this week to present a legislative alternative to a Senate takeover of the process - thus salvaging a shred of integrity for himself and the chamber he allegedly leads - was dashed to bits by a letter from Heritage Action warning against any concessions. That one letter scattered his caucus like geese. Just after 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, however, Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham presented himself on Fox News, of all places, and said, "Everybody understands that we'll not be able to repeal this law until 2017."

Wait, what?

Yup.

At one point on Tuesday, the House GOP's island-of-misfit-toys idea of a good deal was to strip their own Congressional staffers of their health insurance, because damn it, someone has to get hurt to make this whole mess worthwhile. Not long after that punctured trial balloon hissed out of existence came another lumpy Hindenburg trailing a banner that read, "Contraception Clause," which also, after a few ticks, crashed and burned. After that, there was some muttering and growling about the House passing something, anything, and then blowing town so as to leave the Senate holding the bag. As they couldn't even come to a consensus on the wetness of water, however, that quasi-terroristic tactic never saw the light of day.

And then there was Ted Cruz, Republican Senator from Texas, who has been declared politically dead by the entire "mainstream" news establishment. Did Mr. Cruz ravage the GOP's image root to branch by leading this quixotic charge against the Affordable Care Act? Every poll says "Yes." Does he give a tinker's damn what anyone thinks? His face, and his bank account, say "No." Mr. Cruz has been fundraising on this for a while now, so you can kiss his ass. He doubled his fundraising take this quarter, raking in close to a million dollars, and received a hero's triumphant welcome at the base-of-the-GOP-base Values Voters Summit. All this is why he ran for the Senate in the first place: Teddy ain't care, and if you happen to be one of the flock who bought into his "Kill Obamacare" rhetoric, consider yourself right and properly sheared. You are his useful idiot, and he thanks you for your patronage.

The flabby cry of Republican Senator Lindsay Graham on Tuesday afternoon - "We won't be the last political party to overplay our hand. It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kind of give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up." - speaks for itself. Carve that on his tombstone. As far as political epitaphs go, few have deserved this one more than he.

So.

The government will have sufficient funds to remain open until the middle of January. The debt ceiling has been lifted until the first week of February. As it turns out, the foreshortened deadlines - particularly in regard to the budget - were actively sought by Senator Harry Reid. Had the deal to keep things running encompassed more time, the sequester would have been locked in for another full budget year. Mr. Reid, it seems, wants to attempt to do away with sequestration in the upcoming budget talks before that happens, and from a position of strength. Maybe he'll get rid of it, maybe he won't, but he wants to try. Given the sudden spine he has displayed throughout all this, I am willing to let him take a hack at it.

And as we are on the subject of praise, let us give due respect to the President of the United States. Mr. Obama has taken all manner of flak from "smart people" who say he should be more like Lyndon Johnson and work Congress, massage Congress, glad-hand Congress, and that his failure to do so somehow makes him equally culpable in this fiasco. This is, in point of fact, piebald nonsense. It requires a very special misunderstanding of history to believe that members of Congress in Johnson's day bear any resemblance whatsoever to the meth-addled barn swallows we endure today.

The president's bargaining position throughout this process amounted to "No," and then "No," and then "No," and then "No," and then "No," and then "No," and then "Please proceed," once his opposition collapsed upon itself in disarray and raced to be the first to offer surrender. Politically speaking, this was a rout, and the man holding all the cards hardly said a word.

And so much for the bullshit.

According to Standard & Poor's, this nest of gibberish cost the country $24 billion . An analysis by the much-respected Macroeconomic Advisers puts the total tab for all the budget/debt limit/shutdown mayhem unleashed by the GOP since 2010 at $700 billion, with an additional cost of 900,000 jobs. Very smart people are making the point that the larger damage has already been done , default or otherwise. On the smaller scale, millions of people - government workers, veterans, the disabled, the poor, children - have already felt the lash, and got a full taste of genuine fear when it looked like they were actually going to put the car into the wall.

Anyone you know who has the gall to call this a "victory" is an idiot. Aside from the actual pain this thing caused is the fact that all the Democrats won in the end is a few months of government, and a few months of not looking economic Armageddon in the teeth. The GOP just got a budget CR that operates at the sequestration level they set the last time we spun this Merry-Go-Round, and a faction of their party will try this hostage-taking thing again after the New Year to get even more. Of course they will.

This was a zero-sum gain, and a lot of people lost, badly. It was a nifty exercise in disaster capitalism, more proof of the power of the shock doctrine, and nothing more. Whoever tries to tell you otherwise is selling something.

Finally, anyone who says this mess spells the end of the Tea Party phenomenon is fooling themselves. If anything, the re-branded right-wing created by the Koch Brothers and pimped by CNN will greet the dawn on Thursday morning re-invested in the idea that Jesus hates the poor, women and all brown people, just goddamn because. They see themselves as victims even when they win. Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and the rest of the sharpies will be there to egg them on and pick their pockets. Mark my words: these people have learned no lessons, ceded no ground, and are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Also, there is there is still the Trans-Pacific Partnership to contend with, plus Chained CPI and Medicare means testing (both of which Mr. Obama floated not long ago, which will make an appearance in the budget debate, mark my words), plus the Keystone XL pipeline, plus the ongoing voter restriction efforts, plus the all-important 2014 midterm elections, plus, and plus, and plus, and plus, etc.