Is Eric Cantor Willing to Destroy the Nation's Economy in His Quest for Power?

As a Virginian I view Congressman Eric Cantor as both an embarrassment and as an unscrupulous weasel. He's an embarrassment because he is willing to totally prostitute himself to the worse elements of the far right - including the Christianists who despise non-Christians such as Cantor who is Jewish. He's unscrupulous because he will do anything for power. An op-ed in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank basically agrees with this analysis and underscores the reality that Cantor is power crazy and literally inclined to sell his own mother if the price were right and it aided his mania to secure more power. Think Progress also has a story on Cantor's upside down priorities (e.g., lower taxes for the wealthy versus higher costs for needy college students). Here are some highlights from the Post column:
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Eric Cantor has perfected the strategic sneer. It comes, frequently, when he answers a reporter’s question about something President Obama has said: The House majority leader’s lip curls up on the left side and a look of disgust washes over his face.
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He draws out the vowels in a style that is part southern, part smarty-pants. Had young Cantor spoken like this at his prep school in Richmond, the bigger boys may well have wiped that sneer off his face. Yet even then, Cantor was accustomed to having things his way. According to Cantor’s hometown Richmond Times-Dispatch, the quotation he chose to accompany his yearbook photo was “I want what I want when I want it.”
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What Cantor wants now is power — and he is prepared to risk the full faith and credit of the United States to get it. In a primacy struggle with House Speaker John Boehner, he has done a deft job of aligning himself with Tea Party House members in opposition to any meaningful deal to resolve the debt. If the U.S. government defaults, it will have much to do with Cantor.
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Cantor’s aides say he is merely reflecting his caucus. But Cantor, a veteran of a decade in the Capitol, surely knows that he is jettisoning the last chance in the next couple of years to make a serious dent in the national debt. The White House has so far offered up a tantalizing array of concessions — $4 trillion in budget cuts and overhauls of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – but Cantor has yet to offer anything but sneers.
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Cantor swung his arm over his chair back and raised his upper lip. “I think behind this notion of ‘We want shared sacrifice’ that they continue to say means, ‘We want to raise taxes,’ ” he said. Claiming that there have been “concessions made already” by his side, Cantor was pressed to name some of them. “I don’t want to get into specifics now,” he said.