If Republicans prepare for that, they should be in a good position to clearly and articulately explain why their proposals are better for Americans and better for America.

The Republicans can explain their proposals till the cows come home, but that does not mean those explanations will ever be heard in any objective retelling from CBS, NBC, ABC, NYT, Washington Post, CNN, LA Times, and certainly not from media outlets such as MSNBC. 

Those outlets will be looking for the soundbite from Obama sounding presidential and concilatory, and will cast any Republican resistance as churlish and partisan. 

I really don’t see any upside for Republicans on this unless they get a quid pro quo just for appearing, namely that the current bill is dead and Obama is willing to start over.

Having the Democrats get to sit in backrooms excluding Republicans for over a year writing a 2700 page bill, and then magnanimously offer to insert a few minor Republican things here and there, is not being bipartisan. It’s playing to a compliant media. From what I’ve heard, even McConnell has figured this out.

That brings me to your character, which is just an abyss of deceit and ten other awful things, some of which I’m not sure there are words for, yet.

I

Sure, go for it you Republicans! What could go wrong?

Ay, there’s the rub.

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Zero Private-Sector Jobs Created Since 1998
IOW, all the jobs created from 1998 to about 1007 were dumped in the past 2 1/2 years…roughly, since the Dem’s regained Congress.

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

George Orwell
1984

“Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.” — John Brennan — Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism

If the Bush Administration had said this the “Press Corpse” would have laugh out loud.

It would be nice to see the GOP leaders hold their own primetime presser to explain how they’ve been systematically cut out of negotiations from the beginning, how their own proposals and amendments have never seen the light of day, and how they have made their own proposals for a bipartisan “summit”.  However, I’m not sure they’d get the air time, and even if they did, who the hell wants to listen to Mitch McConnell, chief loser in a pack of losers?