The sequester wasn't designed to be a good law. It was designed to be such a bad law that Congress would feel compelled to replace it with another one. But that's the second crazy thing about the sequester: It's forcing Congress to take painful action where painful action isn't even needed yet.

(2) We don't need to cut the 2013 deficit, anyway.

Don't think of the debt as a monolithic danger. Think of it as a triptych.

In the first frame, we have this year's deficit, which is the difference between taxes and spending in 2013. If the gap were a couple hundred billion dollars bigger, it would be no problem. In fact, it would create jobs, improve infrastructure, and grow the total economy at an incredible bargain because we can borrow money at historically low rates.

In the second frame, we have the next 10 years of deficits. We don't know what's going to happen over this time (who could have predicted the Great Recession in 2003?) but it would be responsible to raise taxes and let spending fall across defense, mandatory, and discretionary spending, at least as an insurance policy against the odds that our interest rates go up more than we'd like in the next 10 years.

In the third frame, there is the long-term debt, which is the accumulation of all these deficits. The long-term debt crisis is basically a health-care crisis. If health-care costs slow down, we'll be fine, basically. If health-care costs don't slow down, we'll be screwed.

The trouble with the sequester is that it cuts spending too dramatically in the first frame of our triptych while doing nothing about the third frame, which is the most important. Even if you wanted to address the second frame in a smart way, you would never, ever use a sequester.

(3) The budget games are rewarding muddy thinking about both parties and the budget.

When negotiations between Republicans and Democrats are breaking down (which is to say, on weekdays), Washington centrists savor being above the fray and blaming each side. But occasionally they float so far above the fray that they disappear into the exosphere of evenhandedness and lose sight of the details on the ground.

We saw this happen with David Brooks, who hammered the Obama Administration for not proposing a balanced plan to replace the sequester. But not only did Obama's balanced proposal exist, but also Brooks later acknowledged that it was more balanced between taxes and spending than he preferred himself. He later apologized (to his considerable credit) in the next column.

National Journal's Ron Fournier has also been quite hard on the president for not reaching a deal on the sequester. "As the nation's chief executive, Obama is ultimately accountable for the budget fiasco," he wrote, "even if he is right on the merits and politics." This seems to blame the president for (a) being right and (b) lacking omnipotence in a divided government -- which strikes me as the best anybody could possibly hope for in a modern leader.