Remember how we used to make fun of and sneer at politically unstable, incompetent countries such as Italy, with its dysfunctional Parliament that could never agree on anything and couldn't even perform its most basic functions, like passing a budget?

Good times.

The latest news out of Washington is that despite the Ted Cruz marathon, House Republicans are coming around to the reality that they can't stop ObamaCare by refusing to fund the rest of government. As Roll Call describes it, House leaders are in "full flinging-spaghetti-at-the-wall mode," trying to come up with a plan that lets them avoid a head-on budget confrontation with the Senate and President Obama. Among the proposals under consideration is a continuing resolution that would fund the government a week at a time, which is yet another sign of how quickly they are lurching from bad idea to worse idea.

Unfortunately, the GOP decision to back away from a government shutdown does not mean that the cray-cray has abated in any serious fashion. Oh no. Instead, it is merely shifting its focus and amping up its volume. For reasons that I cannot fathom, Washington Republicans have now decided that refusing to raise the debt ceiling and threatening to send the government into default offers them a more promising landscape for the battle ahead.

Again, that makes no sense to me. The potential harm to the country is certainly several times greater under a default scenario, which in a perverted way might be said to give the Republicans more leverage. However, it is only leverage if you really are willing to use it, and once the Dow starts dropping and jobs start disappearing, the backlash that would come against the GOP for forcing a default would be intense.

Yet GOP leaders just don't see it that way. While President Obama says that he will refuse to negotiate over the debt ceiling, U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, expresses his party's attitude pretty succinctly when he says that the president “is going to pay some price for it," including a fatal one-year delay in ObamaCare.

Burr's formulation is telling: The president "is going to pay some price for it" because he cares more about averting disaster than the Republicans do? The president "is going to have to pay a price" to stop the Republican Party from driving us into the ditch? When did this become a country in which a president has to "pay a price" so that elected representatives won't do us great harm?

I simply have a hard time believing that the GOP is going to be able to sell that approach to the American people. It reeks of an act of desperation by a party that knows it is losing its grip on legitimate levers of power and is turning to any ploy possible to convince its followers that it is still relevent.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal  House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan bolsters that reading of the situation.

“The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves,” Ryan said. “We are stuck with this government another three years.”

In other words, having lost an election, and thus their chance at changing policy through legitimate means, Republicans feel more justified than ever to stoop to radical, extra-constitutional measures to get their way.

But let's talk bottom line, shall we? Even the farcical, unworkable, hard-right 2014 budget written by Ryan and passed by House Republicans back in March calls for a $538 billion deficit in the upcoming fiscal year. In other words, even under their own dream scenario, a scenario in which all the Democrats vanish from Washington and the GOP is in total charge, the debt ceiling would have to be raised immediately and it would have to be raised substantially. But in the land of funhouse mirrors in which they now live, they have convinced each other that such realities simply don't matter.

The whole situation is just nuts.