Just wants to eat you, not negotiating in good faith
Yesterday I saw The Hobbit. I hope the President sees it too. There is a valuable lesson within the hobbit that every sensible person should know, and that lesson is that you can't negotiate with trolls whose number one goal is your destruction.
No, you can't open negotiations by letting the trolls eat only three dwarves for now while holding the others hostage for further concessions later. The only way to negotiate with trolls is to play for time until the sunlight turns those trolls into stone and dust. And if your first suggestion is that the trolls skin the dwarves alive, expect the dwarves to curse the hell out of you.
You see, Bilbo didn't defeat Gollum by first offering to let Gollum eat his legs in the spirit of bipartisanship . And I'm not comparing Gollum to John Boehner. Gollum didn't start off as evil.
But the big money special interest driving this fiscal cliff debate are. The special interests are no better than orcs riding wolves. Any negotiation that allows the wolves to eat our companions alive just a little bit is a non starter.
So here is what you should do if you are held hostage by trolls. Do not attempt to negotiate with the trolls. The trolls don't want to work with you, they don't want to help you rebuild Middle-Earth, they just want to smash your heads, eat you alive and stash your valuables in a troll cave in the Cayman Islands. The only debate the special interests are having is if they should bake the last remnants of the middle/working class and poor into a pie or squash us into jelly. On behalf of my fellow companions I say no deal.
Remember, the Orcs only call it class war when the Hobbits fight back.