To all those who are smarmily talking down to the President of the United States over his negotiating skills, your supernatural expertise in these matters is urgently needed in the field in a number of areas:
1. Negotiating climate change pacts. Since the current situation was such a no-brainer to you, your brilliant, rapierlike, Machiavellian minds should have no trouble bringing diplomats together behind global regulation treaties, once you are finished conquering your peers on World of Warcraft and brush the Cheeto crumbs from your peach fuzz.
2. Peace in the Middle East. Many have tried before, I know, but those people were just corporatist stooges going through kabuki to fool the proletariat. None of them ever really wanted peace in the Middle East. Unlike you. Once we get you involved, the matter should be wrapped up in a number of weeks.
3. Democratize China. See, the problem with China isn't that it's under the hamfisted control of a giant bureaucracy of crooked authoritarian scumbags - it's that both the Communists and the pro-democracy activists they oppress are equally guilty of conspiring to crush the people. Everyone other than you is equally wrong. The only way China will ever be free is if you get involved. Fuck all those sellouts who rot in prison for years trying to free their country - they capitulate the moment their balls are hooked up car batteries, the pansies.
4. Gerrymandering in America. For a moment I thought the gerrymandered House of Representatives was going to be a problem in this country, but thank God we have you or we'd never have known that we can just ignore it and it will miraculously go away. Legislation supported by Democrats will miracle its way over and around this corrupted situation, and budgets will win the approval of the criminals holding them hostage if we just wish hard enough and hold our breaths and stomp our feet. Lame-o President Obama would have us believe that his actions as President have to account for the leadership of the House somehow, but that's only because his kung fu is not as strong as yours. Your ninja skills are so superior, you can tiptoe across terra cotta rooftops and then fly straight from the White House into the Senate without setting foot on anything John Boehner controls.
It turns out we've been wasting a lot of time and money over centuries on diplomacy and special forces rescue teams when all we needed were a bunch of idle amateur bloviators to go express their disappointment all over an intransigent enemy and the issues would magically resolve themselves by the sheer power of petulance. Makes me wonder why we even need a government when we have the internet. You fine folks who've spoken of the President as if he were a slow-learning kindergartener know in your hearts you could do his job way better than he could, don't you? And that's why I've constructed a playground just for you folks to negotiate your own little play-crises, just like the world leaders whose level you seem to believe you share.
Here's the Offer/Counter-offer teetoter-totter, since negotiation is 1-dimensional and any implication that it's more complicated is inconceivable Vizzini-style. "You mean there's more to negotiation than I say 4, they say 2, and then we settle on 3? But that's how they always do it on TEEVEE! Don't sell me this 11-dimensional gobbledegook poindexter, I know real negotiation when I see it on a Fox sitcom." Another integral part of the playground: The Mood Swing Set, where you can practice radically oscillating between idle complacency and hysterical sense of victimhood. You can then jump immediatley from the Mood Swing Set to the next closest playset, a cross you can nail yourself to in your infinite sense of betrayal.
I don't support dealing with hostage-takers at all, but I trust President Obama to know his own job and what the situation entails - it's what I hired him for, and what you hired him for. The only problem is some people just never want to let him to do his job. Some people don't want a President at all - they want their own personal sock puppet in Washington who acts in their place like a power of attorney politician rather than an elected representative exercising their own judgment, and that's delusional in a number of ways.
Well, I don't like an elected GOP House "majority" holding America hostage like this after the people have given such a clear mandate to Obama and the Democrats, and I wouldn't tolerate it one damn bit. On the other hand, I'm an obnoxious asshole who couldn't manage a city council meeting without it degenerating into fisticuffs and ideological twilight wars, which is why I'm not President of the United States and Barack Obama is. I know the difference between strength and weakness in a President, and Obama exhibits only strength; I know the difference between competence and ineptitude in a President, and Obama has displayed the former in spades; I know the difference between honest moral determination in service to the American people when I see it, and Barack Obama has been a shining star in this quality during his entire Presidency, and I say to any man that says the opposite, you are either blind, a liar, or a fool, and undoubtedly worth far less to your country than you estimate this great man to be.
As to the merits of the individual deal or not, I don't know. I'm not qualified to know. I hate shenanigans. I hate skullduggery. My version of negotiating would involve a cricket mallet and alligator pits. Which is, once again, why I should never be President. I'd be uncomfortable with giving away anything to these thieves due to the undearned power they possess, but if President Obama determines that it is most advantageous options - or least disadvantageous option - than I trust his assessment, and not blame the messenger for the message.
But any criticism of this deal that reverts to calling Barack Obana a "sellout," "corporatist" "Conservadem" or any such deranged straigth-up Lie needs to be stomped into dust with righteous fury and the voices responsible smacked the hell down from Olympus back the dregs of Firedoglake of wherever the hell whence they came. There is a matter of worthiness to contribute here, to speak Barack Obama's name in a contributory fashion whether supportive or critical, and remain reality-based, and it is a test so often failed the moment one of these Betrayal Puppie Kiddies mood swings ends up swinging in the negative direction. Babysitting them and assuasing their emotional instability and fanfic fantasies about what is going in Washington is a full-time job few serious activists have time to meet and I don't have the interest to attempt, because their way of thinking is just plain beneath me. So I'll terminate this ramble now before it truly obscure, and just learn to deal with the ambiguity that distinctions results from individiausl, and individuals from mixtrues thereof. Untangle that Gordian morass and you may some day be capable of playing this game on an adult level. But short of Step 1, belittling Barack Obama, you sound like a five-year-old declaring that Yao Ming ain't so hot. Be a Better Democrat, then worry about getting more and better Democrats elected.