How, I ask, did any of these idiots make it to adulthood, much less get elected to Congress?

On one side, the Obama Administration, Capitol Hill Democrats, Wall Street whizzes and budget experts have been wearing out their thesauruses looking up new words for “catastrophe” as they try to explain to the public that failing to raise the $14.3 trillion federal debt limit by Aug. 2 would result in a radically different country on Aug. 3. On the other, a passel of House Republicans are essentially dismissing these claims as hysterical fear-mongering.

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“A solid majority of the conference does not believe that when the clock strikes midnight that everything is going to just blow up,” says a House GOP aide. “Their thought is that there is still a cushion for adjustments to be made.”

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At first blush, House Republicans’ dismissal of overwhelming evidence from a bipartisan crop of experts seems staggering. But this is a party whose governing philosophy is predicated on the idea that government is perversely swollen, and that cutting off the circulation to some of its limbs can alleviate pressure without causing irreparable harm.

[snip]

And Democrats are clearly baffled by the challenge of persuading opponents who not only have a different set of priorities, but a different set of facts. “There’s a question about how much the facts matter to them,” says a Democratic official. “And I don’t know what to do about that.”

Facts have a well-known liberal bias, whether it be economic or climatic or anything else.