Keep your pants on, boys.

When you're in a knife fight and someone brings a gun, it's not advantageous to have your pants down around your ankles, boys. Republicans in Congress need to grow a pair, hike their pants up and load their pistols. This is a real fight they are getting from President Dick Tator and it's not really about the money.

It's about power. Absolute power.

With the looming fiscal cliff dampening everyone's Christmas spirit, Obama's negotiating style resembles a vengeful wife in a nasty divorce who keeps refusing settlement offers and demanding ever more from a whipped soon-to-be-ex-husband. Even when Boehner caves on alimony, custody and the house, our miffed and petulant POTUS refuses the offer and demands more.

Charles Krauthammer hammers this point:

Let’s understand President Obama’s strategy in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. It has nothing to do with economics or real fiscal reform. This is entirely about politics. It’s Phase 2 of the 2012 campaign. The election returned him to office. The fiscal cliff negotiations are designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy, something he thinks he earned with his landslide 2.8-point victory margin on Election Day.

This is why he sent Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to the Republicans to convey not a negotiating offer but a demand for unconditional surrender. House Speaker John Boehner had made a peace offering of $800 billion in new revenue. Geithner pocketed Boehner’s $800 billion, doubled it to $1.6 trillion, offered risible cuts that in 2013 would actually be exceeded by new stimulus spending and then demanded that Congress turn over to the president all power over the debt ceiling.

Boehner was stunned. Mitch McConnell laughed out loud. In nobler days, they’d have offered Geithner a pistol and an early-morning appointment at Weehawken. Alas, Boehner gave again, coming back a week later with spending-cut suggestions — as demanded by Geithner — only to have them dismissed with a wave of the hand.

This isn't the negotiating behavior of someone who wants to find an answer. This is the negotiating behavior of someone who wants to break his opposition. Someone who is ruthless - and ideological enough - to break his country to do it. Obama wants political dominance for his party in a country where they are effectively the Politburo. Forever.

Uncle Joe (Stalin) said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Apparently we have plenty of gutless egg-heads in Congress.

What’s going on here? Having taken Boehner’s sword, and then his shirt, Obama sent Geithner to demand Boehner’s trousers. Perhaps this is what Obama means by a balanced approach.

He pretends that Boehner’s offer to raise revenue by eliminating deductions rather than by raising rates is fiscally impossible.

But on July 22, 2011, Obama had said that “$1.2 trillion in additional revenues . . . could be accomplished without hiking tax rates, but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax reform process.” Which is exactly what the Republicans are offering today.

I have often said that the biggest  reason 9/11 resulted in so much tragedy when the hijackers were minimally armed and decidedly overwhelmed was that the passengers thought they were playing a different game. They had been conditioned from decades of hijackings and terrorism to believe that you followed the directives of the hijackers and let the authorities deal with their demands - that the safest thing to do was to do nothing. It wasn't until passengers on UA Flight 93 learned that the planes were being used as missiles that they realized the rules of the game had changed.

This is what Obama is doing. He has changed the game and we don't realize it. He is deliberately destroying this country. That is his intent. It isn't an unfortunate impasse with recalcitrant and intransigent Republicans that we are seeing as we race toward the fiscal cliff. This is a game for the "fundamental transformation" of this country. There are new rules.

Obama has never shown interest in genuine debt reduction. He does nothing for two years, then spends the next two ignoring his own debt-reduction commission. In less than four years, he has increased U.S. public debt by a staggering 83 percent. As a percentage of gross domestic product, the real marker of national solvency, it has spiked from 45 percent to 70 percent.

Obama has never once publicly suggested a structural cut in entitlements. On the contrary, he created an entirely new entitlement — Obamacare — that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will increase spending by $1.7 trillion over 11 years.

The difficulty is in getting people to see the gravity and the magnitude of Obama's plans. No one wants to believe that the president wants to really shred the Constitution and assume unprecedented power. No one wants to believe that we've elected a man twice who really hates this country and the freedoms its citizens have enjoyed for over 200 hundred years. No one wants to believe that Obama is really a bad person, not just an incompetent one.

He is one or the other, though. Flat out bad. Or flat out stupid.

Pick one.

Thomas Sowell pointed out in a column a few weeks ago that the most serious problem concerning the implementation of Obamacare was all the waivers Obama had given out. What Obama has essentially done is create a law that gives him limitless power to punish and reward, according to his whim.

Among the objections to ObamaCare, one that has not gotten as much attention as it should is the president's power to waive the law for any company, union or other enterprise he chooses.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution provides for "equal protection of the laws" for all Americans. To have a law that can cost an organization millions of dollars a year either apply or not apply, depending on the whim or political interest of the President of the United States, is to make a mockery of the rule of law.

How secure is any freedom when there is this kind of arbitrary power in the hands of one man?

What does your right of freedom of speech mean if saying something that irritates the Obama administration means that you or your business has to pay huge amounts of money and get hit with all sorts of red tape under ObamaCare that your competitor is exempted from, because your competitor either kept quiet or praised the Obama administration or donated to its reelection campaign?

And now Obama wants to be given total power over spending by removing any restrictions placed on the debt ceiling by Congress.

John Adams said, "There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt."

John Marshall wrote, "The power to tax is the power to destroy."

Obama wants both these powers, with no restraints.

Say goodnight, Gracie.