Follow-up

From an editorial in today's New York Times ("Washington’s Rogue Elephants"):

[W]hether you’re confronting a rogue elephant or a rogue nuclear state, the advice is the same: stop playing the game. Avoid the elephant or shoot it; politically isolate the rogue state or use military force to disarm it.

What does all this mean for the debt-ceiling debate? So far, President Obama and the Democrats have insisted on negotiations, assuming that the looming threat of debt default would force the Republicans to cave in on their strident demands and accept a compromise.

Instead, given the Republicans’ continued insistence on an unobtainable wish list of spending cuts and constitutional amendments, it’s fair to conclude that Mr. Obama is facing the political equivalent of an elephant in must — a player who simply won’t play the game.

In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.” The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country.