Joe Nocera says what everyone is thinking today, and what some people have been saying for the past couple of years, RE: the American Taliban:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night -- amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama -- Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America's most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn't care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that's what it took.

It was clear since the GOP caused a near-government shutdown earlier this year that Republicans have gone off the deep end, willing to destroy this country to get what they want from Big Government politically. It's why I named this blog Scorched America, from the Scorched Earth strategy where if people can't have life their way, they'd be perfectly happy destroying it as an alternative. That's the Tea Party and increasingly the Republican Party itself, in a nutshell.