"We told you you would lose!" wail the Beltway bundlers of the Republican establishment.

"We told you you would lose!" moan neoconservative columnists from their privileged perches on the op-ed pages of the Beltway press.

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

Mark Twain's insight comes to mind as one observes the panic of Beltway Republicans over the latest polls in the battle of Obamacare.

One way or another, the battle of the budget and the debt ceiling will be over by All Hallows' Eve.

Yet, as one looks deeper, at the irreconcilable conflict behind the present clash, only a roaring optimist would imagine we shall ever know again the tranquility and unity of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years.

In the showdown over the shutdown of the U.S. government, the Obama-ites tipped their hand yesterday as what their strategy is.

Taking a page out of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," the plan is to maximize the people's pain -- to maximize the political damage to the enemy, the Republican Party.

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies," said Winston Churchill.

What is the truth behind the Beltway lies about these crazy Republicans crashing our government?

After his narrow defeat by Gerald Ford at the Kansas City convention in 1976, Ronald Reagan was seen as a has-been.

Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is sometimes credited with the proverb, "God has a special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America."

Wednesday, John Kerry told the Senate not to worry about the cost of an American war on Syria.

"Catastrophic!" said Sen. John McCain.

If Congress votes no on a resolution calling for U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war, says McCain, it would be "catastrophic" for U.S. credibility in the world.

The next 72 hours will be decisive in the career of the speaker of the House. The alternatives he faces are these:

John Boehner can, after "consultation," give his blessing to Barack Obama's decision to launch a war on Syria, a nation that has neither attacked nor threatened us.