Even worse

Warren Christopher has denied that he was the pushover portrayed by "Recount", but we now have our proof that he's a fool for Bushist flim-flam. He has signed on with James Baker, who strong-armed him before, to replace the War Powers Act with the War Powers Consultation Act, which would further emasculate Congress:

It requires Congress to vote up or down on a deployment within 30 days, and it permits a cutoff of funds for deployments if approved by two-thirds of the House and Senate.

What Congress is already too weak to do by majority vote, the law would now require a supermajority to do.

Of course, David Broder loves it:

[T]he Florida antagonists have devised a clever way to signal a healthy change toward bipartisanship in foreign policy.

This bipartisanship, his graven idol, is what got us in the shit we're in, but he always wants more of it.

What America really needs is a Congress that will stand up to Bushists, not one that will accept crumbs from the master's table.

Mitt right but stupid

Look, non-proliferation has always been a liberal approach to a national security problem. The internationalists were for it, the conservatives simply wanted to use military force. Anyone ever heard of preemption? Of course, the internationalists were not all liberals, but the driving force behind engaging adversary and ally alike to reduce the spread of nuclear weaponry was us libs.

People who have a brain understand that arms control and preemption may both be needed at different times. You can tell liberals from conservatives by which stick they reach for first.

Mitt Romney gets points for saying so but only enough to get him the booby prize.

What's really stupid on his part, though, is that his definition of 'bipartisan' is "caving to the conservatives". I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that he labors under this misconception, since that has been the Broderist, Liebermanesque definition for the past twenty years.

True to form, John Roberts totally misses the obvious logic of the story.

What's wrong with the Post

Richard Cohen. Today's column perfectly represents all the bullshit Broderism so rife in the political press.

Obama has said something in 2008 that sounds amazingly realistic - if only it had been said by McCain in 2006! You talk to the leadership of your enemy when there's a chance for peace.

Talk is cheap, especially compared to blood. And it's not by any means a promise to give away the store.

Infuriating Broderism

Scot Lehigh gets back to the naive, sanctimonious bullshit today:

[I]f a new president was genuinely willing to reach out and compromise, some of the reflexive partisanship might start to fade.

Lehigh speaks lovingly of the center without ever acknowledging that the hard-right Republican Party's success at moving the center waaay over to the right came because the Democrats were not partisan enough in the face of Newt Gingrich and Duhbya. Lehigh approvingly quotes Garrison Nelson:

The moderates have basically been disenfranchised by the polarization of contemporary politics. The center wants back in the game - and that is the appeal of both Obama and McCain.

This is not just wrong. It's a lie. The left has been disenfranchised. That's why we "raucous left-wing advocacy groups" have to fucking scream to be heard. We're up against the combined power of the monolithic Republican political operation with its dominating media machine. That's why we view calls for civility as patronizing; pundits like Lehigh are constantly telling us to lie back and think of England.

Now, I'm sure that most of us would love to get back to comity and mutual respect. But, despite their disingenuous claims, the Republicans would not. Polarization and vilification have worked for them.

True constructive bipartisanship will never happen until the Democrats gird up and say, "NO MORE." We've compromised and compromised and compromised for little or nothing.

It takes both sides to achieve a fair bipartisanship, just as it takes both sides to fight. The Republicans have won too much by unilateral warfare on their political opponents to give it back in a make-nice compromise.

So, please, pretty please, stop telling Obama he has to take on his own party, when for seven years and longer, the Republicans in lock-step power have taken no prisoners other than Joe Lieberman and the psychotic Zell Miller among the Democrats.

Bipartisanshit

A friend writes:

Seems like your kind of book...

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HOW EXTREME PARTISANSHIP HAS PARALYZED WASHINGTON AND POLARIZED AMERICA by Ronald Brownstein. A veteran political reporter provides a shrewd election-year assessment of the growing partisanship in American politics, looking at the roots of this polarization and its alarming consequences for the country at large.

---

My intemperate reply, slightly edited but not to make it more temperate:

God, if only Washington had been paralyzed by partisanship during the past 7 years! Partisanship should have saved us from the authoritarian tendencies of the Bushists, but alas the Democrats were weak.

The review reads as though Brownstein is paying obeisance to the faux bipartisanship so popular among the Broderist pundits of the Beltway, the stuff that gives us Lieberman endorsing McCain. It amounts to Democrats meeting Republicans 90% of the way to the right, no matter how extreme the Republicans become. Of course, that’s what Congressional Dems have done on almost everything but Social Security.

I’d argue with several points of conventional bullshit:

• The country is not evenly divided any more. We’ve concluded that the Bushists are bad for America.
• Social Security’s baby-boom-related shortfall was addressed in a bipartisan compromise (when that phrase actually retained its literal sense) in 1983. There’s only a problem if the Treasury reneges on its debts to the program.
• Lock-step party discipline is primarily a creature of the GOP. There is still significant dissent within the Democratic caucus, which is one source of weakness when confronting the ideologically homogeneous Republican caucus.
• We’re more partisan now than we had been, but not more than in times past – and not just the run-up to the Civil War.

What we need now is not to paper over our differences with bland centrism. We need to lurch back to the historic center from the path we’re on, which is the path to fascism. You may think I’m extreme, but where are we headed, if not toward militaristic, xenophobic government driven by corporate interests? Really, the Republican ideology contains all the elements of fascism except anti-Semitism, which played the pseudo-populist role in the 1930s that abortion and gay rights play now. Oh, and domestic violence from the far right has only been minor to this point.

Instead of a center defined by Joe Lieberman, I want a clear polarization because that’s what’s needed to marginalize the Bushists. I think a passel of ‘em ought to do time for Iraq, FISA, and torture, though I don’t really expect that. Duhbya and Darth deserve impeachment. Rummy, Gonzo, Rice, Tenet, Goss, Yoo, Addington, and Scooter (again) should be prosecuted. Oh, and don’t forget Rove. I’m sure there are many more.

For now, we have a far right party and a centrist party (with liberal rank and file); I’d like to see us get back to center-right and center-left before we rely again on bipartisanship as a good thing. Right now, compromise without accountability and transparency is a pig in a poke or worse.

Perfect illustration

Hillary is toying with asking Colin Powell to help restore America's reputation. Huh? He had his chance, and he completely blew it. This is the perfect illustration why I don't like Hillary. For cryin' out loud, can we please have a goddamn change!

Shorter Mark Halperin

"I've totally screwed up my readers since 1990, but listen up: A pox on both parties' houses, and here's my 'deeper question'."

Visionary

Everything you've heard about David Broder is true - everything facile, ass-kissing, and committed to inside-the-Beltway elitism, that is. Here he sucks up to Newt Gingrich for his ideas, nevermind that Newtie is the original hyper-partisan, bomb-throwing, divisive Republican who couldn't give a shit about Broder's usual graven idol, bipartisanship.

Fidel Castro had ideas. Benito Mussolini must've had at least one idea.

But it's obvious that Broder's one idea is smooches to power, not any sort of meaningful bipartisan compromise. What a useless gasbag!

Update: Eric Alterman on Newtie.

More on "Justice Denied"

See Better late than never.

The reason I didn’t want Miers was her complete personal fealty to Duhbya. Mr. President, you want the prerogatives of an elected king, whatever you say I’ll agree. This – not Iraq, not for heaven’s sake abortion, not even the galloping plutocracy – is the number one issue of our day. All the others are symptoms of the fundamental dysfunction of our polity, which is slouching into fascism. Are we going to govern ourselves, or are we so tired of the petty details and hard facts that we’re going to hand over the power to corrupt men like Darth Cheney to do with us what they will – so long as we get to watch Survivor?

Did the Times advocate a filibuster of Alito? That’s the real question. As Jimmy Malone said while choking on his own blood in The Untouchables, “What are you prepared to do about it?” The media has a mania for bipartisanship (‘Broderism’), which mainly translates into Democratic restraint and lots of tongue-clucking about the Republicans’ lack of restraint. My mania is for Constitutional democracy, and that’s not a value I’ll compromise in the vain hope of comity with a bunch of would-be tyrants, even in the name of Liebermanesque bipartisanship. Especially not in the name of anyone who enables Republican abuses like Lieberman.

Too bad the Washington Democrats still hope for comity. They should at every turn be fighting political war instead of thinking about responsible governance. The only path to that is to throw the rascals out and install some lesser rascals.

That includes judges. We need to clean house by all legal means – and some extralegal means, too. You think any of the Supremes are on the Palfrey phone list? God, I hope so.

By the way, I think David Vitter is toast. Another Harvard man bites … the dust.