The Village Bipartisan Block Party...Somewhere a new well of stupidity has been opened

[ProSense]

Saturday, July 28, 2007

The Village Bipartisan Block Party

by digby
Atrios and Jim Henley both handily dispatch this mewling piece about bipartisanship from Anne Marie Slaughter in today's Washington Post, but I was struck by this question from John Emerson in Henley's comment section:

Someone has to trace this bipartisan meme to its source. It’s everywhere these days. Broder himself is too senile to be the prime mover, though I’m sure that whoever started promoting the meme penciled Broder’s name in at the top of his list of prospective vectors.

Somewhere a new well of stupidity has been opened to compete with the heretofore dominant neocon / winger stupidity stream. It would seem that some big player has abandoned the wingers and is moving toward a fall-back position. The memo is obviously out there. But who sent it?

This has actually been going on since the election and I'm a little bit surprised that it's taken so long to reach critical mass. It's coming from the Republicans, of course, aided and abetted by their beltway courtiers.
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"Bipartisanship" is only operative when the Democrats are in power. I don't recall hearing the commentariat scolding the Republicans for not being more accommodating to Democrats during their 12 year reign of terror, do you? I certainly don't recall a lot of garment rending over how the Republicans were isolating their moderates. My recollection was that everyone was cheering the GOP's responsiveness to its "traditional values, low tax, patriotic" base. You remember --- the Real Americans? Karl Rove was widely considered to be a genius.

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This would have been a widely celebrated validation of Rove's scorched earth base strategy if the Republicans had prevailed in November. He was just being responsive to those that brung him, and that's the way democracy works, by Jove --- messy and loud, and God bless America! But sadly for the Village, the dirty hippies won the election and the only possible way the elders can keep them from enacting their crazy schemes like ending the Iraq war and providing health care for kids, is to insist that they share power with the Republicans. They still, even after all this time, believe that the Republicans are the grown-ups. I'll quote myself again:

... we are basically the janitors, winning the contract to clean up after the conservative frat boys who trashed the place for the last few years. And Daddy Broder believes his boys when they tell him it was the cleaning people who caused all the damage because he just can't bring himself to admit that they are out-of-control misfits. After all, they come from such good families and dress so nicely when they come to the club.

And as for how this meme gets spread, I will simply direct you to a piece in the NY Times book review written by Peter Beinert back in 2003:

In ''The Great Unraveling,'' Krugman tries to harness his columns into one overarching argument about the Bush presidency. In the introduction, he calls the administration a ''revolutionary power'' -- a term he takes from Henry Kissinger's analysis of France under Robespierre and Napoleon -- that wants to replace the post-New Deal order with an undiluted plutocracy. But to make his case, Krugman has to do more than merely dissect the administration's policies; he has to explain its motives and culture. And here Krugman's unconventional background becomes a liability. He criticizes Washington reporters for being prisoners of their sources, and the dinner-party-going "commentariat" for succumbing to groupthink. But guest lists that cross ideological lines can help liberals understand the conservatives they write about. And many Washington conservatives genuinely don't see the Bush administration as radical: they see it as having ratified a big-spending, culturally liberal status quo. Krugman assumes a revolutionary consciousness that may not actually exist on the ground.

There you go.

July 28, 2007

I Know When I’m Beat

The only honorable thing to do is admit that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new oped in the Washington Post beats Anne Applebaum out for the title of dumbest thing ever written by anyone in any venue. If it weren’t print, I’d expect her to break into a rendition of “Fly Away, Lesbian Seagull” like the hippie teacher in the Beavis & Butthead movie.

Anne-Marie, let me put it very simply: People like you are responsible for getting the United States into Iraq, people like you make it much harder for us to get out, and people like you increase the danger of newer, stupider wars in Iran and Syria and wherever else. People like you, frankly, validated the set of policies that fostered the September 11, 2001 atrocities before that. If you get the feeling we hate you for that it’s because we hate you for that. Because you realy, really, really messed up. And you couldn’t have messed up that monumentally if you didn’t spend half your time constructing an artificially narrow range of foreign policy outlooks and the other half congratulating yourselves for doing so.

(Note that, in many ways, Slaughter’s oped is Applebaum’s oped, so it may not even be meaningful to distinguish between the two of them.)