Childish behaviour drives Americans to drink US House Speaker John Boehner: "We fought the good fight. All tax collections in the District of Columbia were down sharply in the first two weeks of the shut down, save one - alcohol tax collections actually rose. All references to the childish behaviour of Republican congressmen picking a fight they could not win are unfair - to the children of the United States. Especially given that as these brawlers licked their wounds on Wednesday, some eagerly looked ahead to the next fight - just a few months from now. But hanging over the Washington crisis zone was a question about the desire or the ability of the Grand Old Party to reconcile the amateurish anything-is-possible ambitions of their new Tea Party wing with the realities of politics in DC. When defeat came, it was abject. "We fought the good fight," Speaker John Boehner told a Cincinnati radio station. The fight will continue, but blocking the bipartisan agreement [that resolves the crisis] will not be a tactic for us. Despite the Democratic majorities behind the Obama presidency and the Democrats' control of the Senate, one of the Tea Party diehards, Senator Ted Cruz, told reporters: "Unfortunately, the Washington establishment is failing to listen to the American people." There seems to be a consensus that aside from the policy differences in the Republican Party, the real dispute within the movement, referred to by many as a civil war, is more about tactics. But there was an air of disbelief too that a mob that had been throwing its weight around Washington since 2010 had so wrong-footed themselves. "We tried, we lost," South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney was heard to say over lunch on Wednesday. And sounding like Monty Python's Black Knight, who has had all his limbs severed but still refused to quit the fight, Raul Labrador claimed: "[But] now they know we're willing to fight." The Republican Party went into the budget and debt crisis having heard Barack Obama say a thousand times that he would not cave this time as he did in 2011, when he made spending concessions worth more than $US2 trillion over 10 years. The House Republican majority, dominated by Tea Party conservatives who scorned the debt default warnings, was widely seen until last week as less likely than Obama to flinch. At an Idaho fund-raiser in August, Boehner promised "a whale of a fight." By Wednesday, the Speaker was more blowfish than whale. Even though the gridlock had been broken by Boehner's decision to rely on Democrat votes to carry a House vote to adopt the Senate deal ending the crisis, hardliners emerging from the Speaker's office were aggressive in refusing to read defeat as surrender. Still being hardheaded was a badge of honour. "I'll vote against it," Republican John Fleming, of Louisiana, told reporters. Alluding to the expectation of a better outcome in the next round, his Illinois colleague Adam Kinzinger added: "If we get past tomorrow, we can all take a deep breath and basically refocus - knowing we have January out there - and refocus on trying to get some big things. I'm not overly optimistic, but it's a better position than we are in today. Others, like Labrador of Idaho, suspected that the Republicans had walked, eyes wide open, into an Obama trap. It was the President who linked the budget crisis to the debt crisis, prompting Labrador to observe that the public was never likely to support the assault on Obamacare when the country risked defaulting on its multitrillion-dollar debts. Knocking the wind out of media speculation that Boehner was unlikely to survive as Speaker because of his failed leadership throughout the crisis, Labrador pointed the finger of blame elsewhere - "I'm more upset with my Republican [colleagues] to be honest with you. So if anyone should be kicked out, it's probably those Republicans ... who are unwilling to keep the promises they made to the American people. Others, like Tim Huelskamp, of Kansas, ridiculed his moderate colleagues. It's pretty hard when [Boehner] had a circle of 20 people that step up every day and say 'can we surrender today, Mr Speaker? Can we just go away? Can we make it easy?"' he mocked. Dubbing them the "surrender caucus," he went on: "I'd say the surrender caucus is the whiner caucus and all they do is whine about the battle, as if they thought being elected to Washington was going to be an easy job." Stung by Obama holding the line, Republicans accused him of negotiating in bad faith because he would not engage with them on what he described as their "gun to the head" tactics to gut his signature healthcare laws. "He wouldn't negotiate," Labrador lamented. Ditto Republican Thomas Massie, who marvelled at the Democrats holding their nerve. We kept talking and in a negotiation, the person who keeps talking loses - that's what [Democrat Senate leader] Harry Reid did so well, because he didn't talk. But with these realisations came an obvious acknowledgement that only a few were willing to articulate - they are unlikely to extract much more from the President in the future. Massie, from Kentucky, understood that he might be accused of heresy when he told reporters: "I'm going to commit candor here - I think we have less leverage on the next [budget bill] and on the next debt limit than we did right now." And despite being on the nose, some figured more of their ilk would be elected to Congress at next year's mid-term election. Notwithstanding that they already have a majority in the House, Labrador was looking ahead: "This would have turned out better if we had more conservatives in the House." It was only some time after he spoke that it occurred to some that Labrador may have been misunderstood - by "conservatives" he did not mean more Republicans, he meant more Tea Partiers. All of which prompted Louisiana Republican Charles Boustany to lash out against the Tea Partiers in an interview with National Journal: "There are members with a different agenda - and I'm not sure they're Republican and I'm not sure they're conservative." Americans have watched it all in amazement. They have marked the Republican brand down to one of its lowest popularity ratings and, it seems, they have been driven to drink. Figures released on Thursday revealed that all tax collections in the District of Columbia were down sharply in the first two weeks of the shut down, save one - alcohol tax collections actually rose.