YOU KNOW WHO DOESN'T THINK JOHN BOEHNER IS A SPINELESS WUSS? MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE CRAZY CAUCUS.

This is not the reaction I expected from the teabaggers in the House after John Boehner caved:

House Conservatives Blame Moderates, Not Boehner

... At a longstanding lunch of House conservatives sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, hard-line Republican lawmakers largely rallied around Speaker John A. Boehner, blaming their more moderate colleagues who they said had not had the backbone to stand strong in the fight to defund or delay President Obama’s signature health care law.

"I've actually been really proud of Speaker Boehner the last two and half weeks," said Representative Raul Labrador, Republican of Idaho, one of a small group of members who earlier this year did not vote to re-elect Mr. Boehner as speaker. "I'm more upset with my Republican conference, to be honest with you. It's been Republicans here who apparently always want to fight -- but they want to fight the next fight -- that have given Speaker Boehner the inability to be successful in this fight."

... Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas, called his colleagues who were eager to accept a Senate compromise the "surrender caucus" who just "whine and whine."

"It's pretty hard when he has 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?'" said Mr. Huelskamp, who also did not support Mr. Boehner for speaker earlier this year. "I would 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." ...

We think Boehner is pathetic. We think he allowed himself to be maneuvered into a hopeless situation, forced either to crash the economy or lose his job at the hands of enraged teabaggers. But apparently he's a genius. He seems as if he knew this was a hopeless cause -- but he also seems to have an exquisitely subtle understanding of just how to mollify the lunatics in the asylum he runs. Tell them you're behind them all the way. Let them run into the streets and destroy all the property they like. Then, when the authorities (i.e., the financial markets) declare that their bourgeois riot has to be shut down, he tells them he was on their side all along.

And they believe him.

Boehner has issued a statement on the end of the crisis. Ed Kilgore mocks it as a "timid sheep" moment, an expression of false bluster almost as embarrassing as a notorious press release issued by Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign during one of its flameouts. But maybe that's unfair. Maybe the futile bravura of Boehner's statement is actually brilliantly calculated:

"The House has fought with everything it has to convince the president of the United States to engage in bipartisan negotiations aimed at addressing our country's debt and providing fairness for the American people under ObamaCare. That fight will continue. But blocking the bipartisan agreement reached today by the members of the Senate will not be a tactic for us. In addition to the risk of default, doing so would open the door for the Democratic majority in Washington to raise taxes again on the American people and undo the spending caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act without replacing them with better spending cuts. With our nation's economy still struggling under years of the president's policies, raising taxes is not a viable option. Our drive to stop the train wreck that is the president's health care law will continue. We will rely on aggressive oversight that highlights the law's massive flaws and smart, targeted strikes that split the legislative coalition the president has relied upon to force his health care law on the American people."

Maybe this sort of chest-thumping is all the crazy caucus wants. Well, maybe not all -- they wanted to wreak havoc in America, and they did. They wanted us to take them -- or at least their ability to destroy -- seriously, and we did. And now, apparently all they want in order to think it's all been worthwhile is for their boss to lead a rousing chorus of "Wolverines!"

So they're actually fine right now. They're not going to call for Boehner's head. They think he's a Wolverine, too. They've got a long list of people who've stabbed them in the back -- they're always being stabbed in the back, you see -- but he's not on the list.

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MORE: At a meeting of the GOP conference Boehner gets a standing ovation:

... after Speaker John Boehner told Republicans they had "fought the good fight," they all rose up to offer a standing ovation. "It was one of the easiest meetings we’ve ever had," says Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.

"I think he has strengthened his position in leadership," Representative John Fleming says about Boehner. "He hung in there with us. He’s been reluctant to go to these fights and now that we have stood up and fought for our values and he’s been there with us, leading, I think his stock has risen tremendously. He has great security as our leader and our speaker."