When the most clear eyed person in DC is Dan Burton you know you've gone through the looking glass

If a fiscal cliff deal isn't struck by the end of the year, President Barack Obama will be in such a strong bargaining position that Republicans will be forced to accept the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts for income above $250,000, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), an arch conservative, predicted Thursday.
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"Let's say that we don't do anything," said Burton, gaming it out in conversation with reporters off the House floor. "He lets us go over the fiscal cliff. They're going to blame Republicans. And then the president's going to be the savior."

Obama, reasoned Burton, will be able to use the bully pulpit, including his State of the Union address, to force Republicans into accepting a deal that's worse than they could get now.

"If we go over the fiscal cliff, the president just comes back and says, 'OK, we're going to give tax cuts to everybody under $250,000.' Who's going to vote against that? Everybody'll vote for that. Everybody. Because it will be just a fait accompli. You won't be voting on whether you're going to do away with a tax cut, you're going to be reimposing tax cuts for everybody under $250,000. So the Republicans are in an untenable situation."

If the economy takes a hit before the State of the Union, he added, Obama could hammer them in that speech. "The president just says, 'Well, those guys, those Republicans are just killing everything. They're gonna make taxes go up on 98 percent of people,' and then he comes back in three or four weeks when he gives his State of the Union message and says, 'I'm going to reimpose those tax cuts,' and then if the economy goes to hell, everyone's going to say, 'It's those Republicans.'"

I’m not sure it’s widely understood just how angry some of the major stakeholders on the left are about the latest turns in the fiscal cliff talks. The sight of the White House offering more concessions to John Boehner, only to be met with more GOP intransigence in the form of his absurd Plan B, is stirring bad memories of 2011 and has some on the left insisting that the only proper response is for Obama to rescind his most recent offer.

Case in point: The AFL-CIO wants Obama to pull back his proposal to raise the income threshold on the tax hikes to $400,000 and to rescind the offer of Chained CPI on Social Security.

“He needs to recognize what everyone else recognizes, which is that he made an overly generous offer to Boehner, and Boehner threw it back at him,” Damon Silvers, the policy director for the AFL-CIO, told me this afternoon. “The appropriate response is to tell Boehner the offer is no longer valid.”