Republican House Speaker John Boehner wasted little time in reviving the debt ceiling hostage threat that led to the current fiscal cliff debacle, telling reporters last week that he intended to extract political concessions from President Obama in exchange for not crashing the world economy. Over a year ago, I asked Jay Carney how the President would deal with this threat in his second term, and while Carney didn’t really have an answer, as it turns out, I did. “Throughout this process, you and everybody sane pretty much has agreed that the threat of a default was a catastrophic one,” I told Carney, “So I’m wondering why the response from the outset wasn’t, well, we can talk about what you want after you put the pin the back in the grenade.  And what are the chances that that’s how the President will respond when this comes up in his second term?”