Has Obama jumped the shark?

Last night, Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC had a special comment regarding the great tax "compromise" engineered by Obama and the Republicans. It was great. I really liked what he had to say near the beginning of the comment:

In exchange for selling out a principle campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made, in exchange for betraying the truth that the idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly indefensible tax cuts for a decade, in exchange for giving the idle and corporate rich of this country two more years to accumulate still more and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and sell everybody else—

In exchange for extending what he spent the weeks before the midterms calling tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires to people who have proven, without a scintilla of doubt, without even a fig leaf of phony effort to make it look like they would do otherwise, that they will keep the money for themselves—

In exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic, disproved-for-a-decade three-card Monte game of an economic theory purveyed by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts for the rich will somehow lead to job creation, even though if that had ever been true in the slightest, the economy would not be where it is today.

In exchange for giving tax cuts for the rich which the nation cannot afford, and extending their vintage through the next election and thus promising, at best, a reenactment of this whole sorry, amoral, degrading spectacle during the 2012 presidential campaign, when the sides will be climbing over each other to again extend these cuts—

In exchange for this searing and transcendent capitulation, the President got just thirteen months of extended benefits for those unemployed less than 100 weeks. And he got nothing, absolutely nothing for those unemployed for longer, the 99ers.

Very well said.

Rachel Maddow, at the end of her show right after Countdown, pulled out a favorite quote of hers supposedly from Gandhi,

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Sadly, she then proceeded to illustrate how the Obama administration has it backwards,

So, first he won. Then they fought him. He got a lot of legislation passed in his first two years as president. But by fighting him in this way, the Republicans destroyed him in the midterms.

And in the first big test of whether those midterm losses had seriously wounded the president, or whether he was going to come back stronger after that defeat, the president face-planted, calling a hastily-arranged press conference to try to defend an inexplicable capitulation, even before his opponents have taken power, even with public opinion on his side.

So first he won. Then they fought him. And now, with the way he lost this fight, we have arrived at the part you would hope would be the worst of this process, but it isn‘t.

What is happening now is that this presidency is at risk of becoming a punch line. It‘s not that he has lost a fight or two or three or four. It‘s that the very idea that he knows how to win or even wants to win has become a joke.

In my opinion, this administration is over. Time to move on. Of course, with the two-party system, whoever grabs the torch will perpetuate this travesty against the people of the United States...except for the politically elite and the rich and powerful.