(no subject)

[proximoception]

I guess the best you can do is say, "I won't negotiate with threateners while being explicitly threatened." The perception that you're caving to the threat of future threats during ensuing negotiations will be gleefully played up by your adversaries, may make you look less than firm, may whet their appetite for future threats etc. But the message will be received that future threats will get them, at best, more of that, and at the cost of however much lasting unpopularity this present threat will lead to. And the perception that Obama will have in effect caved will presumably not spread as far as the more obvious impression that his opponents judged him weaker than he was and then betrayed their own weakness by backing down in the face of that solidity.

But there's no clean win, is the problem - no clear repudiation. Only the mass of voting-age Americans can deliver that, and their gullibility and complacence got us into this mess.

They say the great hope is demographic change. But it's sobering when your best political hope is the eventual natural demise of a sufficiently large number of incorrigible assholes.