"Call His Freaking Bluff..."

So the President, aka Captain Thin-skin, got agitated at the debt ceiling negotiations and yelled at Eric Cantor. He reportedly said:

This may bring down my presidency, but I will not yield on this.

Predictably, the spin is not that Obama is cranky and walked out on the meeting, but that Leader Cantor is rude, or got a lecture, or something. All that matters to most of the media is that Obama is always the good guy.

This is why negotiations like this never, ever work out for conservatives. In the end, it really does matter that almost the entire media is on the President’s side. It matters that the judgment call about whether the President is said to be cracking or standing on principle will always turn out favorably for him. It matters that the Greek chorus of the left is already damning Cantor for failing to play the President’s game. In these close situations, the press is never averse to putting a thumb on the scales.

That’s exactly what happened back when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were negotiating over a government shutdown. It was Clinton that effectively shut down the government the moment he realized he could spin it into a political gain. Sure enough, the Republicans got the blame from the media and the Comeback Kid was born. Now here we go again…

I can assure you there are editorial writers across the country just itching to apply the same mytho-poetic narrative of death and resurrection to this President, the President most of them voted for and hope to see reelected. They want this almost as bad as he does.

So let’s just start from that premise, i.e. there is no way to win the media war. No Mitch McConnell style gimmick will be allowed to land a blow on Democrats. The press will go into overdrive to explain it away. You may outwit the President but you will never beat the liberal media this close to an election. Fuggetaboutit.

So if the media is determined to make sure you lose, and they are, you may as well lose in such a way that Obama loses too. Don’t lose and also hand Obama the 2012 election. That’s a double loss for you and the country. Instead, call his freaking bluff.

Yes you’ll be blamed for everything, but that’s going to happen anyway. At least if you stay firm he wont be able to walk into 2012 claiming to be a bipartisan President (and a tough negotiator!) who dealt with the spending crisis.

Anything is better than abetting the horrible lie that a small cut in the planned increase amounting to a few trillion dollars over ten years is a solution to $1.5 trillion annual deficits and a $14 trillion dollar debt. Better to face a downgrade of our debt now than push it off a couple years simply so Obama can swagger to reelection before having to do this all over again. (And again, the press will make sure you’re the bad guy.)

It’s time to face the music. You’ve lost. You were always going to lose. But that doesn’t mean Obama has to win.