The story is that as Mark Twain and novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked Twain, “Do you think it will stop?” Twain answered, “It always has.” The debt-ceiling impasse has, as things generally do, ended, and a post-mortem validates conservatives’ portrayal of Barack Obama and their dismay about the dangers and incompetence of liberalism’s legacy, the regulatory state. For weeks, you could not fling a brick in Washington without hitting someone with a debt-reduction plan — unless you hit Obama, whose plan, which he intimated was terrifically brave, was never put on paper.