Today is the day of the New Hampshire primary and the press waits in breathless anticipation of the result. I say breathless because they haven’t stopped talking about it long enough to take a breath. Meanwhile, back on Deep Space Nine….
Date from yesterday shows a marked drop in violence in Iraq since The Surge™ started. However, the ever-wise talking heads of a liberal or democratic bent opine that it was not, in fact, The Surge™ that caused the improved situation. The Surge™ was a non-entity, you see, because deployment of 30,000 more troops would make no difference in a county of millions. Instead, as one commentator said while I was picking out my shirt for today, the drop in violence resulted form something that occurred months before The Surge™ started. This seems to ignore that during the first portion of the surge, the casualty numbers kept climbing. Of course in a dynamic and chaotic situation such as Iraq it is utterly impossible to nail down exactly what causes what. That’s the problem with an environment where you can’t control all the variables. Still, it looks like sour grapes and petty partisan politics for the pundits to run around claiming The Surge™ is not responsible for the improvement. For that matter, I am not sure what the same pundits are advocating as a course of action if they are correct. Should we 1) Go back to what we were doing pre-The Surge™; 2) Withdraw our troops and hope they are not part of the solution; or 3) Just continue doing exactly what we are doing without giving any credit to the troops for the success?
Likewise, another of this morning’s news stories was about the Justice Department deciding to pursue a criminal investigation with regard to the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of interrogation video tapes. One commentator offered that this was a move by The Administration (meaning all Republicans somehow, I think) to dilute the Press’s focus of the Congressional inquiry into the same matter. The commentator pointed out that, with a criminal investigation underway, people would be less willing to testify to Congress and would assert their Fifth Amendment right more. Mind you, had the Justice Department not to initiate its investigation, these same commentators would be suggesting a partisan motive for NOT doing so.
I toss those two tidbits out because of a third news item, apparently a groups of folks including Mayor Bloomberg (I may or may not be spelling that correctly) met and declared that the number one challenge facing this nation was the extreme partisanship of its politics. This group called for the principle agenda of the next President to be bi-partisanship. (Bi-partisanship is a buzzword for cooperation and compromise.) Of course, to have cooperation and/or compromise, both sides have to be willing to do so. If just the leader wants tries to do it but the kids don’t want to play along, then it won’t work and the leader simply looks ineffectual.
Why is partisanship so “extreme?” I’ve got lots of theories starting with wondering if it really is worse now than it was. Are today’s partisans worse than the Federalist/Anti-Federalists? Are they worse than the Northern and Southern states circa 1850? I don’t know. From my limited view, much of the current acrimony started with the New Deal. A President had a Congress dominated by his party and he was able to “get things done.” Of course, anyone opposed to his policies felt things were being done to them. From 1932 until 1994 or so, Washington was either controlled by the Democrats or divided, which resulted in a generally Democratic lien to policy including social policies. Many members of American society, call them Fundamentalists though not all of them are, found their sacred institutions under attack by “liberal” policies. They saw Roe v. Wade, the ban on prayers in school, and gay rights as attacks on their religion, their God. These actions to them were not just wrong, they were evil. People tend to get excited when they think that, and excited people are unreasonable. They rallied, organized, and formed groups such as the Moral Majority. And they formed a deep seeded resentment and hatred for the “left.”
Then in the mid-nineties, Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America swept into power in both the House and the Senate. G. W. Bush followed into office in 2000 and suddenly the folks who had felt so “done unto” for seventy years suddenly saw the opportunity to “undo” so much of the “damage” and start “doing unto” the left. This agenda was rigorously pursued. The left, unused to such treatment after seventy years of never being completely out of power, found the other side’s former shoes a bit more uncomfortable that they liked and they started to resent all the things that were being done unto them and their policies. They longed to return everything to the “correct” way they had had it before. The funny thing is that of course, while it is right and proper to cram your (correct) philosophy down the other (incorrect) person’s throat (often for their own good), it is somehow never as right or proper when someone else does it to you. In any case, if the polls are any prediction, 2008 will likely lead to the left having complete control of Washington. The right did that to themselves.
It was anger at a current administration that swept the Democrats into office in 1930-32, and it was anger that swept the Republicans into office in the mid-nineties. Because of that anger, there was a deep seated need for revenge, a need to give it to the other guy for a change. Now, with the shoe apparently on the other foot, the liberals are the ones who are mad and they want their revenge. It sounds good to urge the next President to make bi-partisanship the top of the agenda, and it may even be the best course, but I just don’t see that happening. Instead, I see the Democrats sweeping in and doing their damnedest to cleanse the heresy of the Bush Presidency, it policies, and its “achievements.”
The problem is that revenge is never the best path to common ground.
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