The GOP should start seriously worrying about the impressive number of wins they are racking up, sooner rather than later. At some point, with Republicans winning seemingly all the time and Democrats losing even easy fights like protecting very popular entitlement programs, the country will inevitably start judging the GOP based on the results of their victories, through the filter of the extreme stress those battles put the country through.

When unemployment doesn't drop and jobs don't materialize -- remember that nothing the GOP has done since January, or really since becoming the minority has ever been claimed to be good for the economy in a verifiable way -- people are going to look around and question the GOP governing philosophy and what it has really accomplished for them. For all the supposed deficit reductions we're looking at, and the new restrictions on abortion nationwide, rolling back light bulb standards, fighting off badly needed revenue increases through tax hikes, blocking judges nominated to fill record vacancies at an unprecedented rate, on and on.

With the GOP winning on all those fronts even winning fights they don't want to win, they'll have nobody to blame when all their agenda wins end up helping only the professional Republican Party, but not America at large.

The almost-government shutdown and debt default were the two biggest fights of the year, and the GOP won both. (After inventing both crisis -- I remember when Rham Emanuel or someone in the administration was criticized for saying something along the lines of never let a crisis go to waste; but Republicans have taken that to another level: just invent a crisis instead of waiting for one to take advantage of.) Eventually they'll have to answer for that when a couple of months down the road, main stream America didn't get a god damned thing from it.