Lead me to what I want

There has been a different sound coming out of Congress since the election.  They are talking like maybe they'd like to cut a deal on the deficit and taxes.

But this is Congress, and they don't mean it.  What they are doing is making is sound like they want to cut a deal when they really don't want it.

I don't know if Speakeasy Boehner is going to get his shock troops in line for anything, but he doesn't sound any different than he did six months ago:

"This framework can lead to common grounds, and I hope the president will respond today in that same spirit," Boehner said. "This is an opportunity for the president to lead. This is his moment to engage the Congress and work towards a solution that can pass both chambers."

Implicit in that statement, however, was the idea that raising taxes on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans could not pass the House, although in exit polls at Tuesday's elections, about 6 in 10 voters said they favored that approach. The statement also assumes that Democrats should abandon a position, favored by voters, that already represents a significant compromise from their original position.

 So, in essence, what Boehner is saying here is that the President has the opportunity to lead, provided he does it our way and gives us exactly what we want now, which is the same thing that we wanted before the election.

Screw him.

Which is essentially what Paul Krugman is saying: Let's Not Make a Deal

Both the Bush-era tax cuts and the Obama administration’s payroll tax cut are set to expire, even as automatic spending cuts in defense and elsewhere kick in thanks to the deal struck after the 2011 confrontation over the debt ceiling. And the looming combination of tax increases and spending cuts looks easily large enough to push America back into recession.

Nobody wants to see that happen. Yet it may happen all the same, and Mr. Obama has to be willing to let it happen if necessary. 

Why? Because Republicans are trying, for the third time since he took office, to use economic blackmail to achieve a goal they lack the votes to achieve through the normal legislative process. In particular, they want to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, even though the nation can’t afford to make those tax cuts permanent and the public believes that taxes on the rich should go up — and they’re threatening to block any deal on anything else unless they get their way. So they are, in effect, threatening to tank the economy unless their demands are met.

What else is new?  Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, or is that just the light of the train that's coming full-speed to run us off the rails?