BIPARTISAN BALONEY

Over on Salon Glenn Greenwald is on about ‘bipartisanship’ as exemplified in the excuses given by the Senate for re-re-embracing the execrable Joe Lieberman. Good for Glenn. (‘Has there been too much bipartisanship or too little?’, http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/18/bipartisanship/print.html )

You have to read “Liberty Under Siege”, Walter Karp’s jaw-dropping history of the early Reagan years to understand to what rotten purposes ‘bipartisanship’ has been put. Tip O’Neill, hating what the late Sixties had done to his Party machine, and terrified of what the early Sixties had done to his Party’s electoral viability, had stymied Carter’s presidency while simultaneously selling Congress to the corporations by inventing and selling PACs (subsequently blessed by the Supreme Court as ‘free speech’).

In this way he ensured the income of Members by effectively legalizing bribery, hiding it in plain sight. (Whether, with the development of other-national PACs such as AIPAC, this became not simply a matter of Members being bribed but Members engaging in treacherous – perhaps treasonous – collusion with a foreign government, is a question that has not received the recognition it so richly deserves.)

Aware that some of the demands of the various Identities had now almost-permanently fractured the citizenry, and perhaps aware that the economy of the postwar United States was now losing ground to foreign economic developments, O’Neill decreed – under the table – that the Democrats would ‘work with’ the Reagan Administration. There would be ‘bipartisanship’, which became in practice a code-word for abolishing an effective opposition Party and doing ‘whatever it takes’ (in the candid Israeli phrase) to keep ‘things’ rolling.

Perhaps the Tipster feared for the very existence of the Democratic Party itself; if so, it is a dark testament indeed to the damage wrought by Identity Politics and ‘revolutionary’ politics. As if anybody with an ounce of sense couldn’t have seen that outcome just by putting it up on a drawing board beforehand: Leninist tactics, Goebbelsian propaganda, and deconstructionist Theory did not promise easy fraternity (or sorority) with the Constitutional concepts of the Founders. They had been designed, as a matter of fact, with an eye to destroying those concepts. This is news?

Those partial to Democrats who cawn’t think why the Democrats have been ‘duped’ and ‘bamboozled’ all these years and decades need look no further than Tip O’Neill’s ‘bipartisanship’. The Democrats have been Republicans for more than a quarter of a century.

There is no opposition Party.

This country, thus, doesn’t stand in need of a third political Party; it stands in dire and grievous need of a second one. And very very soon. President-elect Obama has to start moving the Democrats along toward recovering their ground and principles and - for that matter - the Constitutional principles on which the country was Founded. Being 'bipartisan' with the Republicans as they are presently constituted is akin to entering into marriage with a corpse, and a plague-ridden one at that.

But the Democrats have allowed themselves to become infected with some hugely plaguey stuff themselves, brought over by carriers from failed tyrannies and revolutionary visions.

ALSO:

I’d like to go out on a limb with this thought: In addition to all of the other reasons for ‘bipartisanship’, I can’t help but wondering if the wily Israeli realm didn’t take a page from that cunning, treacherous freak J. Edgar Hoover and compile its own ‘files’ on high-ranking pols and government officials. Of course, if the Honorable Members have been collecting cash all these years, that may itself constitute enough of a ‘file’ , but it wouldn't hurt to keep a file with anything that might induce a Member to be 'friendly' rather than risk exposure.