It's Time For The President To Take Back His Presidency --- By Charles P. Pierce
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He should take back, in every detail, the speech that made him famous in Boston in 2004, because subsequent events have rendered it either naive or the most grotesque of fantasies. He should explain to this Congress, and to the country that visited that Congress upon him and upon itself, that, in doing so, it may well have dealt a blow to self-government from which self-government may not recover for a very long time. I hope he makes the point quite clearly that a party that cannot control Ted Cruz is so clearly demented as to never be trusted with any kind of power again. (I also hope he mentions neither the Keystone XL pipeline nor Guantanamo Bay, but I'm not shooting the moon here.) It is the affirmative obligation of the opposing party to point out -- constantly, and in vivid detail -- that the other party is walking around with a bird on its head. It is the affirmative obligation of the president -- who, after all, really has nothing more to lose -- to be the loudest voice doing so, and then to move on and govern the country, if nobody else wants the latter job.
He should pronounce himself ready to stand the gaff. If he really does begin signing executive orders and acting like a president, then the howls from the monkeyhouse opposition will be audible on Neptune. It long has been the obvious conclusion of those folks that this president was elected (twice) in order to be a largely ceremonial figure, and to embody the greatness of America in overcoming its original sins, but not actually to be president. My dear young man, that simply is...not...done. To them, his election (twice) to the presidency was merely yet another bipartisan "compromise" that demonstrates the beneficent genius of America, not a mandate for government, because don't be ridiculous, darlings. After all, remember the wise words of Millard Fillmore, president of the United States, the 13th of that title, who taught us that the genius of the American system occurs when both sides cut a deal of which nobody entirely approves, and that there is no problem so great that our political class cannot agree to kick it down the road a few years no matter how much misery that causes to the people who don't count for much, anyway. That, friends, is LEADERSHIP!
In my last annual message I stated that I considered the series of measures which had been adopted at the previous session in reference to the agitation growing out of the Territorial and slavery questions as a final settlement in principle and substance of the dangerous and exciting subjects which they embraced, and I recommended adherence to the adjustment established by those measures until time and experience should demonstrate the necessity of further legislation to guard against evasion or abuse. I was not induced to make this recommendation because I thought those measures perfect, for no human legislation can be perfect. Wide differences and jarring opinions can only be reconciled by yielding something on all sides, and this result had been reached after an angry conflict of many months, in which one part of the country was arrayed against another, and violent convulsion seemed to be imminent.
Imminent? Hell, it took 12 more years. Nice job, Millard. I mean, what do you people want, anyway?
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/state-of-the-union-012814
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Does anyone here really expect the "howls from the Monkey House" to get any worse if Obama starts behaving like a President elected and re-elected with a large Mandate for Change from the American People? 
