President "wouldn't take yes for an answer" - Speaker

Livid with anger, his countenance pale and grim, President Barack Hussein Obama strode out of a darkened East Wing of the White House like an enraged ghost and admitted he could not make a budget deficit deal with the Republicans.

The nation is headed for default on a national debt of $14.3 trillion which Congress will not increase as a matter of routine, as it has so many times before in a perfunctory fashion. Those days, according to the nation's chief money man, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, are over. The lower chamber of the legislative branch simply refuses to raise the nation's debt ceiling, a lever which has never before been thrown in the annual scramble of give and take to finance the budget.

The president said, "This means we will not be able to pay our bills." He seemed to be visibly shocked.

In one last ditch attempt to compromise on a Senate proposal that would reduce the budget deficit by $2.7 billion over 10 years through spending cuts only - and no increase in revenues - he said, "We can't allow the American people to become collateral damage to Washington's political warfare."

In a tight-lipped address to the nation, Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner said "The president would not take yes for an answer."

In a nationally televised rebuttal, he said he had given "my all" to work out a deal with the man whose name, even this deep into his first term, still sounds strange to American ears, President Barack Hussein Obama, a Harvard-trained attorney who worked as a "community organizer" on the South side of Chicago before taking a seat in the Illinois state Senate, then won a seat in the world's most exclusive private club for millionaires, the United States Senate.

A world of financial creditors, market punters, tax payers, triumphant Tea Party activists and frightened disability recipients who suffer from terminal diseases, awaits the moment when the other shoe drops following this moment of high fiscal drama.

It is not a situation unprecedented to behold.

The Roman Republic descended into the chaos of its former self when such fiscal posturing in the Senate of that ancient federalistic and tripartite government led to precisely the same type of uncertainties, chief among them a lack of confidence among its columns of Foreign Legions that the Senators who mustered them would be able to pay their salaries in that far-flung world empire. In that atmosphere of constant crisis, the former republic soon became an imperial system of dictatorship ruled by a single junta, led by a single personality, financed by coin minted through fiat.

Whither the United States of America? The world waits and watches. All hands, prepare to testify, but keep the powder dry. God save the United States of America!

Great Caesar's ghost, I say.

All hail U.S.S. Constitution.

- The Legendary, a well-known sea lawyer and brig barrister