...fuck exactly how the President chooses to go about passing strong public option legislation. Guarantee a veto without it or don't; use the word "must" or just express a strong preference; rhetorically serenade "bipartisanship" or hire Dolph Lundgren to visit Chuck Grassley and say "I must crush you"; use reconciliation or personally man a tank to shell AHIP headquarters into dust - I don't give a rat's hemmorhoid, as long as the end result is the right legislation.
A lot of people seem to be suffering under a very powerful delusion: Namely, that you know what you're talking about and anyone who disagrees with you - even a world-class genius in his own field - does not. This is the kind of petulant, narcissistic fallacy that drives a lot of the shallower versions of evolution or climate change denial. "So what if he's a Nobel Prize-winning PhD biologist and I'm a bartender with a GED? I'm just s'posed 'ta accept all that monkey mumbo jumbo 'cuz some big shot says so? I ain't never seen no ev'looshin."
It's not exactly the same thing, but it's hard not to miss the same phenomenon at work listening to people who think being a blogger, having opinions, and showing up at rallies puts them in a position to credibly lecture Barack Obama on the minutiae of legislative tactics. Even beyond the gargantuan Pythonesque absurdity of it all, I still marvel in awe that anyone actually fucking cares how the President conducts day-to-day politics in pursuit of shared objectives. Do you people barge into operating rooms when your loved ones are having surgery to tell the surgeon what to do and start screeching "You're killing him/her!" if they're less than receptive to your advice? I mean, does the concept of someone else being more competent than you on a purely technical question of tactics regarding their specific talent and specialty not compute?
About the only way any of that could even be motivationally rational would be is if they doubt the President's integrity, and that's where Teh Stupid really begins to burn my ass. Hey, I have an idea - since no matter what anyone does, you're going to instantly suspect them of treachery and corruption the minute they choose a word you find inconvenient or engage in strategic thinking above your pay grade, how about we just not have a President? Let's instead have a minimum wage fast food worker who simply presses buttons according to your explicit instructions.
As you clearly find independent intelligence and operational competence threatening in a leader, let's eliminate them entirely and make the job of president just a simple matter of you ordering up public option with a side of ACES and some zit-faced teenager can just press the buttons. Now all we need to do to make this practical is invent a machine that automatically gets legislation through Congress. Oh hell, let's do away with Congress too. Who needs all that debate and discussion when you already know both what you want and the best way to get it. Let's make you dictator. If your petulant verbal commands fail to make people skip to your tune, you can just call them "sellouts" and that oughtta put them back in line.
Feel free to inform the president of what outcome you would like; feel free to inform him that you will not accept anything less than public option; but feel free to go fuck yourself the minute you think you're going to enlighten him about how to do his job, and impugn either his competence or integrity if he does not immediately implement your brilliant insights against his own judgment. You might want to review the whole "representative democracy" concept, as you seem to think it both your prerogative and duty as a citizen to insist on dictating how he wipes his ass.
Once again, I don't give a gyrating, skyrocketing, warbling, resonating, cascading, zooming, gyroscoping, telescoping, spiraling, twisting, sublimating, electrophorescing, syncopating, animating, rotoscoping, masturbating, Zamboni-ing FUCK whether the President's day-to-day tactical decisions are like the ones I would make. In fact, I'm damn glad they're not, because...and here's a real humdinger of a difficult concept to wrap your heads around...I'm not a political genius and he is. So on the rare occasions that I think what he's doing looks stupid...99% of the time that's going to mean I simply don't know the situation. Knowing your own ignorance and accounting for it should not be a difficult concept for people as self-congratulatory about our enlightenment as we are. How, you might ask, am I going to judge his effectiveness? Well, let's see...how about if he gets a strong public option passed, he knows what he's doing and you don't? Hmm? Sound good, everyone?
Come on, everybody, time to take the I Will Reasonably Defer to Competent Leadership on Tactical and Strategic Questions and Not Rationalize Doing Otherwise by Yanking Paranoid Fantasies Out of My Ass pledge:
I, (state your name), do solemnly swear that if President Obama passes a strong public option bill, I will finally and at long last accept that we are on the same team and trust his judgment about what he himself needs to be doing as President to advance the agenda we share. I swear that I will not cite laundry lists of enormous inherited problems that he has not yet managed to magically solve as evidence of "betrayal." Forthwith, if I do again engage in such asshattery, I hereby commit to the following: Anyone may say "public option" and I swear to hit myself in the face and loudly proclaim "I need a diaper change!" regardless of where I am.