More on the White House Failure

I want to quote some of an analysis by Hunter, at Daily Kos, of the White House's performance in the recent debt ceiling negotiations.  I have repeatedly said things like this for the last year or two, but I think it is important to hear it from someone other than a squawking parrot.  This is a pretty good summation of the whole situation:

"The more we hear reaction from both parties, the more convinced I am that...this "compromise" is in fact an unambiguous and abominable failure by the administration... and one which is going to have serious long-term negative repercussions for the economy, the markets, and the political environment in general.

This practice—agreeing to even the most outrageous conservative demands now in exchange for the mere hope of a better outcome later—has been pervasive in this White House, and extremely damaging. 

Each negotiation...sets the administration up for worse failures in the next round of negotiations, as their own targets continue to slide further and further away.

This most current "deal" consists almost entirely of caving in to a wide assortment of hard-right conservative demands, in exchange for presumed "fairer" or "more advantageous" dealings with those same Republicans later. Careful students of modern politics will note the profound ridiculousness of such an assumption."

"Careful students" indeed.  By now- no, by a long time ago- it has been completely obvious to everyone that the Republicans are not going to honor a shred of any deal they make to get what they want now.  It is becoming increasingly hard to escape the conclusion that Obama actually wants the same thing the Republicans do, since at every step, despite his hollow rhetoric, that is what he manages to achieve.

I never thought that, at this point, the energy which we should be directing toward the corrupt and destructive behavior of Republicans should have to be diverted to deal with a failed President that we worked so hard to elect, but there it is.  The Republicans are running our train straight to hell, and Obama is out in front of them turning the switches so it gets there as fast as possible.  This is the last thing we could have expected to be dealing with at this point, but it's where we are.