Turns out I’m not the only one whose mind turned to this image this week. Here it is used to represent the supposed suicidal run at the American president over his Affordable Care Act. Charge of the Light Brigade kind of stuff, suicide mission and a rout.

Yet what’s a party going to do? If the only tactic is to stand still and be run over while the other side does what it wants, then do nothing and just get on with life. But if the aim is to try to avert a disaster, or at least to publicise that the aim is to avert a disaster, who is to say what is to be done?

The economics of the debt and deficits is pretty straightforward as is the likely disaster that is to follow the introduction of “Obamacare”. The politics, on the other hand, is a matter of political judgment of which most of the people who make it into Congress have at least some level of a proven expertise.

The problem of problems in the US remains the distortions created by the media. How to get any kind of non-Democrat message into the community is an unknown. The US is being ruined because there is no means to have conservative concerns widely discussed and treated with respect across most of the places in which the media might be expected to reach. The shutdown and the attempt to force a compromise was a tactic to try to achieve at least some kind of wider understanding that there are reasons for concern.

On the politics I remain agnostic and unsure but I am far from thinking it was a certain mistake.