Also, let's be completely fair to the '62 Mets: today's congressional players are not people who are being asked to perform beyond their skill level, like, say, Marv Throneberry. All they need is a small amount of ordinary human courage that would qualify them to lead. They don't have it. Says Steve Bell, who has seen the best of bipartisanship in the Senate as a former top aide to former Sen. Pete Domenici, R.-N.M., starting back in 1974, eventually rising to director of the Senate Budget Committee: "It's truly a pathetic outcome."

Even for a political season. The proximity of the presidential election is hardly an excuse, since none of the committee members is running. Nor does the calculation made by some Republicans, that they can hold out until Barack Obama is defeated in 2012, make much sense. Does a minority party that runs a legislative body with a 9 percent approval rating - less than what Americans think of polygamy and communism -- really think it's going to gain the public support it needs to take over the White House and both houses of Congress and get its way in 2013?

So with the supercommittee on the verge of failure -- midnight Monday is the deadline by which it was to have given the Congressional Budget Office a plan to cut $1.2 trillion out of the deficit over 10 years -- we have entered a kind of Kafka-esque realm of non-accountability (to switch metaphors). A committee designed by Congress (dubiously, I might add) to avoid responsibility is proving unable to take responsibility itself. So it is kicking things back to the original evaders of responsibility, completing the circle of dysfunction. And now the main impulse in among Republicans in that same Congress will be to try to rescind at least part of the "sequester" on defense, thus seeking to undermine their body's own attempt to rob itself of the ability to undermine itself when it created those automatic triggers in the first place.

"I'm not saying it's anybody's fault," Hensarling explained expansively on Sunday when he was asked about the supercommittee stalemate, and the total avoidance of responsibility. "We've got people with very different views frankly of what it takes to produce jobs and what it takes to produce economic growth."

Please. We understand the difference in ideology. We understand the anger of the tea-party movement. We understand that Washington has, until now, proved itself all but incapable of changing its spending habits. But let's fairly assign responsibility, even if the politicians won't. The tea party movement resulted from a slow burn after years of betrayal by the conservatives' own kind, a trend that started frankly with Ronald Reagan (Remember David Stockman, and The Triumph of Politics?) and ended with George W. Bush. Obama only provided the tipping point.