The conventional wisdom about the Republican threat to refuse to raise the debt ceiling is that this is just another hostage-taking scenario. They can't actually want to force the US into default, because the results wold be catastrophic, so they must just be using the threat of such a catastrophe to extort some policy ransom from our side. They're just bluffing, as Jed Lewison concludes in discussing the debt ceiling fight yesterday.
Perhaps the conventional wisdom is right, and they are just bluffing. But the conventional wisdom is systematically ignoring the growing numbers of Rs, of whom Pawlenty was only the latest, who offer a theory of how we could have a no-risk national bankruptcy, one that wouldn't result in an economic meltdown.
I'll explore how credible or incredible that is below the fold...