Dear Washington Press Corps: Please STFU

I don't know who Shant Mesrobian is, but he does a great job channeling an inner Matt Taibbi in a piece on Medium, Dear Washington Press Corps: Please STFU.

First, the obvious. Asking the President to “man up,” admit defeat, and submit to a Republican mandate could only be the product of a waking up from a six-year coma. Are Milbank and Fournier really unaware of what exactly has been happening these past six years? The fact that President Obama won both of his elections resoundingly, only to immediately face a totally intransigent, obstructionist Republican party in Congress? One hell bent on not allowing the President to exercise any election-derived mandate, whatsoever? And now, they’re instructing the President to do exactly the opposite of that. And why? Because Republicans just scored a resounding victory of their own — one that is largely due to their strategy of denying the President the slightest hint of legislative achievement by obstructing his agenda at every turn for the past six years.

I’m pretty sure that by the age of five, we’re all endowed with enough cognitive ability to see through this line of logic. If anything, the lesson President Obama should draw from this is to ignore any theoretical “mandate” Republicans may have derived from this election, and just do whatever he wants. (Yes, one could plausibly argue that the President has more of an interest in compromising than Congress, because he might stand to suffer more politically from Washington’s “gridlock.” Besides the obvious fact that surrendering the presidency into a political hostage and puppet of the Congressional opposition might not be such a great idea for the republic, we’ll get to the deeper reason why this makes no sense in a moment.) But again, this is all stating the obvious. So rather than going any further with this, it’s important to ask how such an absurd notion —such a plainly obvious double standard—could even come to be.

Read the whole thing. I learned that of the votes cast for the next Senate (from 2010, 2012 and 2014), Democrat senators got roughly 5.2 million more votes.