[Washington Examiner] Bachmann pointed to a recent Washington Post article which included a long list of government shutdowns in the last 35 years. "We were there 17 times," she said. "Five times under Jimmy Carter they did a government shutdown. Eight times under Reagan -- twice in October before the 1984 landslide. And they didn't worry about it, they just did it."

"I was looking at some of the history," Bachmann continued. "When the Republicans did the slowdown in '95, they did two, one in November and then one in December. What they were fighting over, the first one, was getting the budget to balance in seven years. And the second one was over Bill Clinton trying to do a sleight of hand -- he wanted to use Office of Management and Budget numbers versus Congressional Budget Office numbers. So the Republicans shut the joint down over using OMB numbers over the CBO. My, how times have changed. We're considered radical to have a ten-year balance under Paul Ryan. We're going to shut the government down under OMB versus CBO ? That's what they did then. Now, in my opinion, I don't think I'd be shutting the government down over that."

But even then, House Republicans did not suffer terrible consequences, as Bachmann and others point out. After the shutdowns, the GOP was re-elected to control of the House in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004 before losing in 2006.

So Bachmann, and many other Republicans, remain unafraid as the clock ticks down. "I don't get upset about brinksmanship," she told me. "That's what negotiation is. I was a federal tax lawyer. That's all I did -- negotiation. And in negotiation, you usually don't get anywhere until the final five minutes, and then everybody realizes OK, we're going to have to break and actually make this thing happen. That's how negotiation works."

[BLOGS.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] Maybe it's because we have become so inured to Islamist terrorism in the 12 years since 9/11 that even something like the blowing-up of 85 Christians outside a church in Pakistain no longer shocks us or even makes it on to many newspaper front pages. But consider what happened: two men strapped with explosives walked into a group of men, women and kiddies who were queuing for food and blew up themselves and the innocents gathered around them. Who does that? How far must a person have drifted from any basic system of moral values to behave in such an unrestrained and wicked fashion? Yet the Guardian tells us it is "moral masturbation" to express outrage over this attack, and it would be better to give into a "sober recognition that there are many bad things we can't as a matter of fact do much about". This is a demand that we further acclimatise to the peculiar and perverse bloody Islamist attacks around the world, shrug our shoulders, put away our moral compasses, and say: "Ah well, this kind of thing happens."

Or consider the attack on Westgate in Kenya, where both the old and the young, black and white, male and female were targeted. With no clear stated aims from the people who carried the attack out, and no logic to their strange and brutal behaviour, Westgate had more in common with those mass mall and school shootings that are occasionally carried out by disturbed people in the West than it did with the political violence of yesteryear. And yet still observers avoid using the T-word or the M-word (murder) to describe what happened there, and instead attach all sorts of made-up, see-through political theories to this rampage, giving what was effectively a terror tantrum executed by morally unrestrained Islamists the respectability of being a political protest of some breed.

Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanity's moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic. Consider the hundreds of suicide kabooms that have taken place in Iraq in recent years, a great number of them against ordinary Iraqis, often children. Western apologists for this wave of weird violence, which they call "resistance", claim it is about fighting against the Western forces which were occupying Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion. If so, it's the first "resistance" in history whose prime targets have been civilians rather than security forces, and which has failed to put forward any kind of political programme that its violence is allegedly designed to achieve. Even experts in counterinsurgency have found themselves perplexed by the numerous nameless suicide assaults on massive numbers of civilians in post-war Iraq, and the fact that these violent actors, unlike the vast majority of violent political actors in history, have "developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern". One Iraqi attack has stuck in my mind for seven years. In 2006 a female jacket wallah blew herself up among families -- including many mothers and their offspring -- who were queuing up for kerosene. Can you imagine what happened? A terrible glimpse was offered by this line in a Washington Post report on 24 September 2006: "Two pre-teen girls embraced each other as they burned to death."

What motivates this perversity? What are its origins? Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to face up to the newness of this unrestrained, aim-free, civilian-targeting violence, Western observers do all sorts of moral contortions in an effort to present such violence as run-of-the-mill or even possibly a justifiable response to Western militarism. Some say, "Well, America kills women and kiddies too, in its drone attacks", wilfully overlooking the fact such people are not the targets of America's military interventions -- and I say that as someone who has opposed every American venture overseas of the past 20 years. If you cannot see the difference between a drone strike that goes wrong and kills an entire family and a man who crashes his car into the middle of a group of children accepting sweets from a US soldier and them blows himself and them up -- as happened in Iraq in 2005 -- then there is something wrong with you. Other observers say that Islamists, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the individuals who attacked London and New York, are fighting against Western imperialism in Moslem lands. But that doesn't add up. How does blowing up Iraqi children represent a strike against American militarism? How is detonating a bomb on the London Underground a stab at the Foreign Office? It is ridiculous, and more than a little immoral, to try to dress up nihilistic assaults designed merely to kill as many ordinary people as possible as some kind of principled political violence.