Matt, we need the fallback behaviour in the stdlib so we can gracefully degrade the stdlib's *own* timeout handling back to the 3.2 status quo when there is no monotic clock available. It is *not* acceptable for the Python 3.3 stdlib to only work on platforms that provide a monotonic clock.

Since duplicating that logic in every module that handles timeouts would be silly, it makes sense to provide an obvious way to do it in the time module.

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Sent from my phone, thus the relative brevity :)