Let me finish tonight with this.
There is no way to predict how far or how crazy the right-wing of this country is headed.
No way.
Nor is there any way to safely predict its leader. How can anyone, including me, forget that the winner of the Iowa presidential straw poll the last time around was Michele Bachmann!
But the power, the heat, and the atmospherics in the Republican party all point to an extremely hard draft to the right between now and 2016.
Will the Wild Bunch of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Lee get caught in a boxed canyon of their own making?
Will they make the mistake of trying to bring down the US government, risking or even damaging our financial credit in the world?
Will they hurt the American economy just to make a political point?
We’ll have to see.
And we’ll see fairly quickly. This point of no return for the Wild Bunch is coming up on us in mid-October. We just learned that today.
Most vitally, will the President stick to the red line he has drawn?
Will he pursue a program of economic justice and job creation and opportunity while holding fast to the country’s fiscal trust?
Will he stick to his promise that when it comes to the enemies of this country’s economic strength he will do what he’s determined to do to Damascus… make any crossing of his red line a fateful decision for those who dare to cross it.
Chris Matthews