The grown-ups try to take charge

When the game is child's play, the adult will be derided for blinking.

If the full faith and credit of your nation is at risk, it is indeed a child who thinks only of himself and his party, its turf and its bragging rights, or who, in huffy allegiance to his overly simplistic ideology, stubbornly refuses to be reasonable.

We now behold three grown-up blinkers, thus potentially heroic Americans.

The issue is whether the children are so out of control that three grown-up supervisors, one Democrat and two Republicans, are entirely too few.

President Obama blinked, bless him. He incurred the wrath of his left-flanking Democratic ideologues by telling House Speaker John Boehner that, all right, let's take this debt ceiling opportunity to do something big, as you say you want, on Medicare and Social Security.

Boehner blinked, bless him, telling Obama that, all right, let's plug up some tax code loopholes as you want if indeed you're willing to go along with me on that other.

Obama could have dragged along a kicking and screaming Nancy Pelosi. But the tea party kids now in charge of the Republican playground wouldn't hear of Boehner's adulthood.

Why, the very idea that their speaker would make a deal with that socialist Muslim president from Kenya and allow taxes to go up on a few gloriously rich people and corporations -- they would not hear of such blasphemy.

Some of these tea-party radicals in the House laid it out candidly for The New York Times the other day: Look, they said, defaulting on our debt might shake things up for a while, yes, but it might be the very drama that we require to get government smaller and get spending reduced so that we might fashion a more fiscally responsible future for our children and grandchildren.

No one can say exactly what will happen if, after Aug. 2, the Treasury Department must start picking which expenditures to make and which debts to pay. That is precisely the frightful point -- that no one can say.

Playing chicken on the open highway or putting a pistol to your head in Russian roulette -- those are not the governing metaphors America needs. These are not the practices of sane people.

It is possible that, with an array of American debts left unpaid, the bond market would crater and interest rates would soar and credit would be frozen.

That is to say your variable rate mortgage could explode as your house value declines. It is to say that Visa might tell you the card is inoperable for the time being. It is to say that the stock market could plummet and your 401(k) with it -- the latter happening at the very moment you needed to protect your assets, your responsible savings, to fortify yourself in a credit-tight or credit-denied world.

So it happened on Tuesday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, bless him, blinked.

He'd already blinked a little, declining to filibuster a debt ceiling solution by which Republicans could kill any deal by invoking 60 votes. But this time he told a news conference that, while it was all Obama's fault, the nation needed an escape hatch, a parachute, so that America would meets its debt obligations in the likely event a spending-cut compromise couldn't be reached by Aug. 2.

So he proposed that, for a last gasp, Republicans would reject any real debt ceiling resolution and merely vote to give Obama periodic authority to make unilateral and short-term adjustments in the debt ceiling.

That would permit America to make its debt payments on time while permitting Republicans to run against Obama as the wild socialist spender who keeps personally piling up our innocent grandchildren's unsustainable debt.

Remember that McConnell is on record saying the sole purpose of his Senate service is to get Obama beat.

The kids on the playground were last seen huddling, either to deride the wimpish Mitch McConnell for blinking or to try to figure out if his solution was sufficiently juvenile. Let us hope it is sufficient, just so.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.