Mitch McConnell, worst negotiator ever!

As I've noted many times in recent weeks, the debt ceiling is a chimera.  Actually, it's not just a chimera, it's a chimera that was created by the US and that legislators are using to scare the public.  POTUS and Tim Geithner have now inserted the debt ceiling into the fiscal cliff talks.  The response of Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin was to compare such an eventuality as giving debt ceiling responsibility to POTUS to giving him a limitless credit card.  This was an incredibly uninformed response, but neither here nor there since neither of these women is a policy maker or legislator.  However, this week Mitch McConnell chimed in with the same (false) analogy:

The analogy is, of course, demonstrably false, and we should assume that McConnell knows it's false.  So why would he make such a claim?  It's part of the pissing contest over the fiscal cliff.  It simply looks bad to give your opponent anything, no matter how insignificant.  This is a terrible tactic for negotiating.  If you have something entirely meaningless (both to yourself and in itself) that someone else wants, and for which someone else will give you something in exchange, you take that deal--that is a successful negotiation.  What McConnell is doing is more akin to throwing a tantrum.