Can we get a moratorium on pundits saying "rope-a-dope?" I'm starting to get really sick of that phrase.

Last month, Lawrence O'Donnell insisted President Obama was playing 10th-dimensional chess with the Republicans on the debt ceiling negotiations:

What you are now witnessing is the most masterful rope-a-dope ever performed by a president against an opposition party in Congress.

And we all know how that turned out. Somehow I don't think John Boehner, who says he got 98% of what he wanted, was the dope who got roped.

Dan Lyons, yesterday, on the Google-Motorola deal:

Google just sandbagged its rivals. The whole thing was a rope-a-dope maneuver. Google never cared about the Nortel patents. It just wanted to drive up the price so that AppleSoft (those happy new bedmates) would overpay. Today, with the Motorola deal, Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel.

Hear that? Google got THREE TIMES the patents! For only THREE TIMES the price! Plus the alienation of all the other Android partners!

I don't know how things will work out in the future, but right now Obama and Google are looking more like Homer Simpson than Muhammed Ali.