After duly referencing Robert Redford Bob Woodward’s version of this charge offered the other day, M&O say it’s too simple. They claim that the idea emerged through 2011 negotiations between “the parties,” who proposed a super-committee to iron out a deficit-reduction plan, and a sequester as something “designed to be so potentially destructive that the supercommittee would surely reach a deal to avert it.” They say that O never envisaged the possibility that it would actually happen.