What "bipartisanship" in Washington means
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
Whenever the mavens of "bipartisanship" attempt to do more than spout pretty platitudes, they invariably reveal just how vapid and bereft of substance are their slogans. Former Sen. Bob Graham -- who recently joined David Boren, Sam Nunn and others in threatening the country with a plutocratic Michael Bloomberg candidacy if the presidential candidates failed to become more "bipartisan" -- has an Op-Ed in today's Washington Post which is a classic entry in this genre.
Graham purports to list a slew of problems suffering from a lack of bipartisanship -- "huge gaps in national and homeland security"; "Nearly 50 million Americans still have no health insurance"; crumbling infrastructure; high gas prices; and a lack of a brighter future for the next generation -- and then proposes a litany of shallow process "solutions" such as a bipartisan cabinet, changes to the format for presidential debates, and regional primaries. Those "solutions" are total nonsequiturs. How would they resolve any of the intense differences over those policies? They manifestly wouldn't.
But more importantly, "bipartisanship" is already rampant in Washington, not rare. And, in almost every significant case, what "bipartisanship" means in Washington is that enough Democrats join with all of the Republicans to endorse and enact into law Republican policies, with which most Democratic voters disagree. That's how so-called "bipartisanship" manifests in almost every case.
(Continued here.)
Salon.com
Whenever the mavens of "bipartisanship" attempt to do more than spout pretty platitudes, they invariably reveal just how vapid and bereft of substance are their slogans. Former Sen. Bob Graham -- who recently joined David Boren, Sam Nunn and others in threatening the country with a plutocratic Michael Bloomberg candidacy if the presidential candidates failed to become more "bipartisan" -- has an Op-Ed in today's Washington Post which is a classic entry in this genre.
Graham purports to list a slew of problems suffering from a lack of bipartisanship -- "huge gaps in national and homeland security"; "Nearly 50 million Americans still have no health insurance"; crumbling infrastructure; high gas prices; and a lack of a brighter future for the next generation -- and then proposes a litany of shallow process "solutions" such as a bipartisan cabinet, changes to the format for presidential debates, and regional primaries. Those "solutions" are total nonsequiturs. How would they resolve any of the intense differences over those policies? They manifestly wouldn't.
But more importantly, "bipartisanship" is already rampant in Washington, not rare. And, in almost every significant case, what "bipartisanship" means in Washington is that enough Democrats join with all of the Republicans to endorse and enact into law Republican policies, with which most Democratic voters disagree. That's how so-called "bipartisanship" manifests in almost every case.
(Continued here.)
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