A friend covering the Hill impasse over the payroll tax cuts insists that Speaker John Boehner's job has become a task of "herding squirrels." Not cats, the more typical go-to cliché for trying to organize the unorganizable, but squirrels: "Squirrels are panicky and prone to irrational running into traffic."

This is an apt enough metaphor, as no matter what the eventual policy outcome – an extension of the tax cut or no – Congressional Republicans are roadkill. The question is just whether or not Democrats will chase out into the street after them.

The House has a reputation for making pointless ideological stands at the expense of their own political capital, and this stand-still will drag the Congressional approval rating even lower than the miserable 18% it already is. They are making a showy refusal to "tax the job creators" (millionaires), though the two-month extension passed by the Senate doesn't have a millionaire tax – it's paid for by fee increases on mortgages insured by GOP bugaboos Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Never mind that making these entities less competitive (the fee would theoretically make private insurers more attractive) is exactly the kind of "free-market" solution to the government's involvement in the housing market that conservatives say they want.

Thus the House Republicans' resistance to the compromise hammered out by the Senate Republicans and the White House seems born out of a generalized obstinacy that voters have shown little patience with; it's not even an ideological stance so much as petulance.

The House leadership has implied it's the Tea Party purists that won't budge, but the GOP tied itself to the Tea Party; they thought they'd be able to siphon off its energy without getting hijacked in the Tea Party's direction. Heh. And does it matter who's trying to buck whose compromise or just that Americans are not going to see that extra percentage of their paychecks?

Privately, all parties are said to agree that the payroll tax reduction is a Good Thing, and that how to "pay for" or "offset" its cost (a calculation neither side brought up when the tax cut was first introduced) is less important than the stimulus it could give the economy – but neither side is willing to take the risk of appearing not to care about deficits. Deficits are the most important thing ever, except when they're not: feel free to get into a costly, no-end-in-sight war without a clue how to pay for it, say, but let's not give the middle class more money in their pockets at a time they're desperate for relief.

Some argue that the general stink of desperate gamesmanship will cling to all parties; the White House clearly hopes that emphasizing the benefits of the cut will keep the stench around Obama to a minimum. Only the GOP nominees have a hope of smelling relatively clean, but they're busy throwing crap at each other.