The Bipartisanship Scam

Arianna Huffington
The Huffington Post

I recently wrote about how, despite a seismic shift that has brought about the mainstreaming of positions and policies formerly considered "left wing," the traditional media continue to insist on promoting the idea that on almost every issue the truth is to be found smack dab in the bipartisan middle.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal served up a classic example of this wrong-headed conventional wisdom, a lengthy piece entitled "America's Race to the Middle," by John Harwood and Gerald Seib.

I was handed the Journal on my Saturday flight from New York to San Francisco on United Airlines. And the Harwood/Seib piece [see below on VoxVerax]was so out of touch with the current zeitgeist that I found myself repeatedly checking the date at the top of the page to make sure the flight attendant hadn't mistakenly given me a paper that someone had left on the plane a decade ago.

The piece starts off by rightly noting the public's "hunger for change" and "major reforms." But the authors then argue that the cause of this hunger is the fact that "the two parties have moved further apart on the ideological spectrum," resulting in "party fatigue."

Excuse me? The reason 82 percent of the public thinks the country is on the wrong track is because of "party fatigue"? This is beyond parody. Might it not have something to do with the Iraq war, the sputtering economy, the price of gas, skyrocketing foreclosures, and the way the Bush administration has systematically shredded the Constitution and abandoned the moral high ground?

(Continued here.)