Inflexibility

Remember just last week when Mitt Romney was ridiculed in the press last week for his anger over President Obama's remark to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, inadvertently caught on an open microphone, that he could be "flexible" over nuclear weapons after the U.S. elections because Russia isn't considered an enemy anymore? Not so fast, buster! Other Republicans - and outgoing Independent-Democratic senator Joe Lieberman - have sided with Romney.  They still consider Russia to be a highly suspicious power, what with the aid the Russians have given Iran and their support of Syria . . . and, you know, some of the former Soviet republics and former Warsaw Pact countries (including, ironically, Poland) still don't trust them. House Speaker John Boehner angrily demanded an explanation for President Obama upon the President's return from Korea for his remarks to Medvedev. Obama has insisted that he only meant that he could negotiate over nuclear arms in better faith once election-year politics were no longer complicating the issue, and of course the Republicans are not buying that explanation. They think he wants to sell out America.

Meanwhile, psychologists who make a living writing books that try to explain why inflexible people destroy themselves will have their hands full trying to explain Keith Olbermann. The clown prince of liberal punditry was just fired from Al Gore's Current TV channel, and not because no one was watching Olbermann's "Countdown" - because no one watches anything on Current TV. Olbermann was fired for breach of contract, along with - among other things - failing to show up for work refusing to help promote the network, and also having less of a say in which shows preceded or followed his own. Geez, even Charlie Sheen never complained about what came before or after "Two and a Half Men" on CBS.

Disagreements between Olbermann and Current TV over coverage of the Iowa caucuses pretty much set the events in motion that led to Olbermann's dismissal. His own inflexibility was not the result of politics, national or office, but his own self-righteous arrogance. It has also resulted in Olbermann re-entering the job market for only a year or so after his similar prima-donna antics at MSNBC got him fired from that network, but with much fewer prospects than before.

Eliot Spitzer, late of CNN - possibly the only cable channel with lower ratings than Current's - has replaced Olbermann.

This growing inflexibility among both politicians and the media figures who cover them is why we have an insufficient health care law, why we have an ideologically charged Supreme Court, and why that same Court is likely to overturn that same law in June.