Open thread for night owls: Will Obama call out the obstructionism of Washington's scoundrels?

At Mother Jones, David Corn writes, Obama Should Play the Blame Game:

In a noble effort, Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, earlier this year published a book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How David Corn the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, in which they insisted that Republicans are indeed the guilty party. These two guys are Washington mainstreamers and hardly quick or eager to issue such a severe verdict. Here's their summation:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges.

That's a strong indictment from these fans of Washington centrism and compromise. (Their Republican rogue's gallery includes Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Rep. Allen West, and the House Republican leaders who countenance the extremism within their caucus.) And they urged the Washington press corps to resist the siren call of both-side-ism: "We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public."

Much of the establishment media has not taken Mann and Ornstein's advice. The Republicans are not routinely depicted as obstructionists and extremists. The political disputes of Washington are frequently cast as food fights, with Ds and Rs each responsible for the flying mashed potatoes. And as long as Obama ends up with pie on his face, the congressional Republicans care little how much is on theirs.

Can Obama do anything to change this script?

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