Digby has an excellent and very long post on the rise of partisanship in government. He quite correctly attributes it to Newt Gingrich and follows the course of how the pitiful excuse we have for a government has developed in just twelve years. Quoting Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann:
Now it is tribal warfare. The consequences are deadly serious. Party and ideology routinely trump institutional interests and responsibilities. Regular order -- the set of rules, norms and traditions designed to ensure a fair and transparent process -- was the first casualty. The results: No serious deliberation. No meaningful oversight of the executive. A culture of corruption. And grievously flawed policy formulation and implementation.
Digby himself:
This was was way beyond what we had long accepted as the polite language of politics that allowed people to battle over issues but maintain decent human relationships when the workday was over. The kind of "bipartisanship" that the old lions are constantly going on about was killed in the 80's and 90's by a political machine that consciously set out to demonize first liberals and then Democrats. David Broder and his friends in Washington can't wrap their minds around the fact that there was a deliberate right wing strategy to kill bipartisanship because they reluctantly went along with it, were duped by it or embraced it themselves.
He also devotes some space to characters like Barack Obama, whom I have come to consider a nonentity. I can't believe the man is being touted for president (granted, mostly by the right, but the Democrats are too befuddled to understand the strategy there).
Read Digby's post. All of it.
And the next time a Republican starts whining about "bipartisanship," throw it in his face.
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