The Fall of Aleppo and the virtual Fall of Washington are linked not just by the lead sponsors or perpetrators of such unimaginable or until recently unimaginable crimes, but by a long and apparently far from finished history of bipartisan and cooperative failures and omissions that, removed from context, provide illimitable opportunity for internecine partisan assault, and therefore for intensification of the underlying conditions of political paralysis and strategic hypochondria that made them possible, and that made events like them, and new ones, virtually certain.