Washington -- The cease-fire, anounced just hours earlier by Daily Kos President Seneca Doane, ended today at precisely 10:51:47 AM EDT when Cenk Uygur, a little known pundit, launched a vicious attack on the White House.
Pressed for details, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said: "We aren't clear on the details of the attack. All we are certain of is that it involved factual errors, overheated rhetoric, weak analogies and unsupported conclusions."
When asked to speculate on what might have motivated the attack, Carney responded: "I have no idea. It's known that he was recently fired by MSNBC, but whether that is related, I cannot say."
An anonymous source close to the President was willing to discuss the attack in greater detail on the condition of anonymity given the volatility of the unfolding situation.
"The attack begain with a complete falsehood," the source said. "Uygur claimed that the White House had 'indicated' that the President would give a 'major speech' after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. It never happened." A subsequent Lexis-Nexis search does indeed reveal that no such promise was ever made by the White House.
"But even worse," the official continued, "was the horribly shallow and weak analysis of the President's negotiating Strategy.
The Official stated that the attack analogized the negotiations over the debt ceiling to negotiations over the purchase of a car.
"That's just nuts."
The official explained: "Negotiating the sale or purchase of a car is a simple proposition. The seller decides how much he wants to sell the car for and the buyer comes in with an amount he is willing to spend. Yes, the parties can highball and lowball each other, but it comes down to that bottom line. If the parties don't reach agreement, they simply walk away from the table.
"That analogy is just idiotically inadequate for the complexity of these negotiationis," the official said.
The official suggested that a better analogy would be a hostile divorce: "A remotely adequately analogy has to take a lot of complicating factors into account. These negotiations more closely resemble a hostile divorce than a car deal because neither party can just walk away, both sides hate each other, they both want to hurt each other, and the longer and more heated the negotiations are, the more both parties lose.
"But to really be adequate," the official continued, "you would need to add some additional complicating facotrs. You would need to imagine tha in this particular divorce one spouse would just as soon the whole thing ended in a murder suicide. You would also have to imagine that law enforcement is powerless to intervene on your behalf under any circumstances, that the mafia is after you, that you have Lou Gehrig's Disease, and that your children hate you. Only an outlandish scenario like that brings you remotely close to the level of complexity of these negotiations.
"I would really be curious to know what sort of shrewd ahd courageous negotiating tactics Cenk Uygur would use to bring a situation like that to a satisfactory end" the official concluded."
The long term impact on Kossack peace negotiations is unclear at this point. President Doane is expected to address the website later this afternoon.
Cenk Uygur could not be reached for comment.