Last Sunday the Washington Post included an excerpt from a new book by Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, (an independent non-profit organization), and Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, (a conservative think tank). The book‘s title is “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism”, but it’s the subtitle that caught my eye-- “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem”.
In it they write, “We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American Politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. (The underline is mine.)
As proof of this I offer Richard Moudock, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Indiana. Wednesday morning he appeared on Fox News and said “I have a mind-set that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view”.
what eye thynk: Those two Republican views say it all and better than I ever could, so I’ll just leave it at that.
My 'knee-jerk' for this is, "it" [the problem] cannot be so easily assigned to one Party.
ReplyDeleteThat's my knee jerk.
But in fact it is the Republican Party who refuses to compromise, to accept scientific data, who are more than willing to kick the old and infirm to the curb.
So much for my knee jerk reaction, huh?
May they reap what they sow...