Posted on 12/23/2010 6:08:13 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Dump the Bipartisan Mush: Here’s How You Do It for Real
By Steven F. Hayward Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Here’s how serious people transcend ideological differences. And we don’t need no stinkin’ ‘no labels’ badges.
All the talk lately of “bipartisan consensus” and the smug No Labels movement brought back to mind the surely apocryphal but truthy story of the Russian visiting a U.S. Senate aide shortly after the fall of Communism in the old USSR. “Please explain two-party system,” the Russian asked, having no experience with multi-party democracy. “It’s simple,” explained the Senate staff veteran. “We have two parties in America—the stupid party and the evil party. Since I’m a Republican, I’m in the stupid party, and we stupidly battle against the evil of the evil party.”
“But sometimes the two parties get together and do something really stupid and evil. We call that ‘bipartisanship.’”
Not even Jon Stewart can nail it more accurately than that.
Everyone says he or she is for ‘bipartisan consensus,’ but usually this represents nothing more than lowest-common-denominator compromise.
Everyone says he or she is for “bipartisan consensus,” but usually this represents nothing more than lowest-common-denominator compromise—necessary from time to time, but hardly a political philosophy. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had it right when she scorned consensus as “the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?”
(Excerpt) Read more at american.com ...
Lowest common denominator is rarely, if ever, good. “Bipartisan” is a bad word, and largely, needs to stay that way. Without any intent of political reference, what happened to doing things the RIGHT WAY? That should be what matters.
The new Congress better have a spine or there will be another political “blood bath” at the next election!
If government was only doing what it was SUPPOSED to do, we’d find that most of what we do can be done in a bipartison manner.
And for most of that work, while the parties might well have differing approaches, compromise between them wouldn’t make it all worse.
The problem is that government does all sorts of things it shouldn’t, and those things are, not surprisingly, mostly highly partisan, and compromise in those areas rarely makes any sense.
Although it isn’t “lowest common denominator”, so much as it is “you let me do my stupid things, and I’ll let you do your evil things”. So it’s more of a capitulation to government badly doing things it shouldn’t be doing.
AMEN
Keep their feet to the fire.
The Global Warming Scam comes to mind. Truth has taken a back seat to majority think....,er,..suggestion. It's always about control.
We have two parties in America, and the politicians in both are out for all they can get, at the expense of America’s voters.
“Bipartisan” is a politically correct word for Republicans giving in to the Dems. It is wrong and needs to be stopped NOW!
“If government was only doing what it was SUPPOSED to do, we’d find that most of what we do can be done in a bipartison manner.”
Absolutely correct.
“Of course, the prerequisite for such a process is an essential openness by all participants to consider challenges to their points of view”
Yeah, it’s called ‘humility’.
Our society doesn’t have enough maturity to display humility. The gov’t nanny-state has taken away most people’s sense of personal responsibility and replaced with a sense of gimmee, gimmee, gimmee all the time.
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