Last Station Before Default

As the train wreck nears with no one at the controls, last-ditch outsiders are trying to get to the brakes.

Fitch Ratings puts the US on “rating watch negative” in the light of impending default.

Our biggest creditor China (we owe them $1.3 trillion) calls for replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency to “permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States” in a “de—Americanized world.”

Even our newest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics pauses in the midst of the champagne cork-popping to worry out loud. “When I look around,” Robert Shiller says, “I see a great deal of foolishness, and I can’t believe it’s not important economically.”

To say the least. Yet nothing, not even an impending crash of world markets and a panicky Senate, is able to loosen the death grip of the Tea Party on the House throttle.

In these nightmare days, sane Americans may just want to go back to bed and hide under the covers, while the oldest among us keep thinking about those Saturday matinee serials at the movies where you could come back next week and find that somebody or something has braked the train to a screeching stop at the very last minute.

“The Perils of Pauline” was never this nerve-racking.

Update: Surprise, surprise. Congress finally gets back on the track.