In response to President Obama’s Tuesday hissy fit press conference:

Mr. President,

At the risk of going all sanctimonious and purist here, and not wanting to sound like an ungrateful pie-in-the-sky idealist who fails to recognize your greatness and the magnitude of your accomplishments, excuse me for being so bold as to assume I have even a smidgen of your knowledge and grasp of the issues and humbly offer a few points of “hope”fully constructive criticism.

The overall problem with your Grand Compromise is not so much the parts but the sum of the whole. You have surrendered to (oops, I mean compromised on) the Republican notion that tax cuts somehow equals economic stimulus. If that were true….well, no need to beat that long-dead supply-side horse.

You say that you were forced into this “deal” because Republicans pretty much had you backed into a corner and were holding middle-class tax cuts “hostage.” Maybe if you hadn’t waited until the last 2 weeks of this session of Congress to do something about the expiring Bush tax cuts (you were aware of the expiration date prior to this month, I assume) that wouldn’t have happened.

You said that your Republican “friends” (those “friends” who have stated their top priority as doing everything in their power to make you a one-termer) had to “swallow some things they didn’t like” in this deal. What would that be? The goal of most Republican policy in oh, say the last 30 years or so, has been two-fold—look out for the rich and….look out for the rich. Seems to me with the permanent temporary extension of the Bush tax rates on income, capital gains, dividends, and the unexpected gift of lower estate taxes thrown into the pot, they just about achieved their nirvana.

The overall numbers might look like you got the best of your “friends,” but on closer examination, not so much. The tax cut measures you wanted total out to $216 billion as opposed to the $125 billion in cuts the Republicans got. But that $125 billion goes to 1% of the people and the $216 billion gets divided among the other 99%. We get a few hundred, they get a few hundred thousand, if not more.

Obviously, you’re still not over the public option debate, and how your sellout of compromise on that aspect of health care reform was somehow misinterpreted by the “purists” as a sign of weakness and not an accurate measure of your “core principles.” Maybe if you hadn’t continued to voice your support for it months after cutting a secret deal with hospitals and insurance companies to not include it in the final legislation, we might have had a better idea of what those “principles” were and taken that into account in the search for “purity.”

Speaking of that, sir. You seem to not miss an opportunity and take great pleasure in browbeating and chastising members of your own party and those who supported you in 2008. I guess it gives you a warm, fuzzy, bi-partisany feeling all over. Good luck with that strategy paying off in 2012.