Sorry About Bipartisanship

This episode examines that oft-praised quality: "Bipartisanship."


Transcript:

Sorry, but someone had to break this to you.

The solution to our country’s problems is not bipartisanship.

Bipartisanship sounds nice, doesn’t it? Like "civility," "centrism," "collaboration," and "compromise." Things the media celebrates... whenever a Democrat has any power.

When Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama adopt that Kumbaya talk, they're giving the power right back. I’m sorry, but the answer to cancer is not compromise.

Before Fonzie ever jumped a shark, the Republican Party did. Back when Eisenhower's VP was elected president.

Unfortunately for him, back then we had news media that cared about honesty and the rule of law.

Today's GOP is a shark.

In these waters, bipartisanship is a ship of fools. Reach across that aisle and your arm comes back a bloody stump.

In the decades since Nixon's rise, Republicans have demonized minorities and the poor, they've rung up record deficits, and they've put the corporate inmates in charge of the corporate asylum.

They've torn down the fourth amendment, the Geneva Conventions, habeas corpus, and Jefferson's wall between church and state. They've taken the statesmanship out of the State Department and the justice out of the Justice Department. The Intelligence out of the CIA, and the Protection out of the EPA.

We’re supposed to partner with that? Should we agree to shred only half the Constitution, to carry American citizens only halfway to Syria to be tortured, to give only half the treasury to America's wealthiest and best-connected? Sorry, but I don’t think so.

Those who would have us compromise with these valueless crooks and incompetents forget that it is they, not us, who defined bipartisanship as "date rape."

In an essential 2004 Washington Monthly column, Paul Glastris described how Bill Kristol and the Contract-on-America GOP Congress ensured that millions of Americans — among other things — would be denied access to health care:

"Kristol," he wrote, "urged in a series of influential memos that the GOP oppose the Clinton plan 'sight unseen,' and commit to sinking whatever plan was devised--on the grounds that successful passage of any plan would keep the Democratic Party in power."

All these sharks do is cheat and eat. They've chewed up our military, our economy, and our national soul.

Sorry, GOP. To quote Marcellus Wallace, there is no you and me. You’ve lost your D.C. privileges.

Now, I'm not advocating pliers and blowtorches or harpoons. But I'm damned tired of Democrats bringing a Hello Kitty pencil case to a knife fight.

And that's the sorry news.