The passage of Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill in Wisconsin was like Stalingrad for public employee unions, I wrote in Unions on the Ropes (April, 2011). Stalingrad was the Nazis' first major defeat (the five month-long battle ended in early February 1943, with two million casualties on both sides).  But it was still possible for Germany to win the war.  Hitler thought he could regain the initiative with a carefully planned offensive to pinch off a bulge in the Russian lines at Kursk (between Stalingrad on the Volga and Moscow in western Russia). But the Nazis were defeated. They lost the cream of their panzers, which they could not replace.  After Kursk (July-August 1943), it was impossible for Germany to win. On Tuesday (8/09) in Wisconsin, public employee unions suffered their Kursk.

If you were canoeing with a friend and you believed, based upon reading the maps, that you were within five minutes of going over a massive and perhaps lethal waterfall, while your math- and geography-challenged friend believed that you had another 15 minutes before going over the falls, would you compromise by agreeing to go another 10 minutes before returning to shore? It is delusional to agree to compromise in such a situation. Sometimes it makes sense to compromise -- other times it can be fatal. President Obama claims that the Republicans are being irresponsible in not wanting to close "tax loopholes" for private jet owners and oil companies. As long as the government continues to grow faster than the economy -- as it has been doing -- there is no tax increase that can solve the problem. It is delusional to think that the kind of tax increases the president has talked about would do anything serious to solve the debt situation, and would not make the unemployment problem worse.

Ever hear of a 1956 movie titled The Man Who Never Was?  It's a true story, based on the 1953 book of the same title written by the man who conducted it, British military intelligence officer Ewen Montagu.  He got the idea for what was named Operation Mincemeat from his colleague Ian Fleming.  (Their secretary, Patricia Bennett, was the model for Miss Moneypenny, and their boss, Admiral John Henry Godfrey, the model for M in Fleming's subsequent James Bond novels.) Montagu secured the corpse of a Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, from a London coroner, dressed him as a fictitious Acting Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, and had him dropped off the coast of Spain chained to a briefcase containing phony plans for an invasion of Greece and Sardinia - assuming, correctly, that the documents would be turned over to German intelligence.  The Germans didn't realize until two weeks after the invasion of Sicily began that neither Greece nor Sardinia was the real target. In America today, The Man Who Never Was is the brilliant, politically moderate reformer with a "first class temperament" journalists told us about in 2008.  The petulant, partisan ideologue we saw during the debt ceiling negotiations bears little resemblance to that guy.

A cynical American businessman, traveling abroad, was asked by perplexed foreigners to explain how our political system works. "In America we have a Stupid Party (the Republicans) and an Evil Party (the Democrats)," the businessman explained.  "Usually, they are at each other's throats.  But every now and then they get together in a bipartisan fashion and pass something that's both stupid and evil." A lot of people on both ends of the political spectrum feel that way about the last minute compromise on a bill to raise the ceiling on the national debt. For conservatives, there isn't much in the deal to love, while liberals were apoplectic.  The hysterical reaction of so many liberals highlights a paradox for conservatives.