Comment on the Belmont Club: "From this moment on"

look for the mask to come back on

Can he do that? His entire life has been built on the simple trick that he, or his coauthor, described in his books. Be clean and articulate and not scary and white people will flock to you. The Con Man thinks that he is virtuous, the Marks are simply begging to be taken. Since Obama is really a one trick pony once the mask on his game is removed he has nothing else to fall back on. I seriously doubt that he can genuinely compromise because that means he would have to acknowledge the moral equality of a negotiating partner. He would have to undertake a genuine commitment and then deliver on it. Has he ever done this in any context? Perhaps he has in his marriage but if so then it seems to be completely seperate from the rest of his life's treatment of other people.

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wws,
he will do his best Neville Chamberlain imitation

Once again I must speak up for Neville Chamberlain. He was wrong but he was not a coward. The sins of Obama are not those of naivete and sincerity but those of malice and avarice.

Paul Ryan may be a good one to go one on one with Obama but I have a hankering to see Fred Thompson do it. My expectation is that after a half hour the public would be looking at BHO and seeing a kid in short pants. Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich would be reduced to inventing quotes where Thompson calls him "Boy."

wretchard,
the President will smash himself on the rocks of his ambition

He does not rise to the level of Greek Tragedy but in his own mind and that of his acolytes he may. That will make him more dangerous as he starts to play his downfall as a theatrical event and not a policy procedure. In Hollywood they are probably already writing script treatments.

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Obama can not negotiate with the Republicans as equals, he has never shown that level of maturity. He's like the Hun, either at your feet or your throat.

Will Pat Robertson see 20" more snow as a sign that God is angry at Washington DC?

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Kinda on topic.
AP, Seats at a premium on planes, trains out of DC.

This could be cinema ready. Can you just see streams of Congresscritters with Bags-O-Swag scrambling to get on a train? Ideally one has a refrigerator that bursts open. It could be like the Masque of the Red Death with all the doomed aristocrats dancing faster as the end approaches.