Who Are Those Guys?

The Washington Post has gone from a truly great example of Gutsy and Righteous Journalism in the mid-70s to its current smarmy incarnation as a Bullshit Centrist Rag.  And seeing as how this piece is co-authored by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, on the surface, it's just more of the same "both sides do it" malarkey.  But it doesn't just feel different - it says it straight out: "the Republican Party is the problem".

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

Then scan through some of the (>5000) comments - which (by my quick and totally unsubstantiated estimation) appear to be running 10-1 in support of the basic premise that the GOP is the problem.  Tho' I think a more accurate characterization would be that the extremists in the GOP who are masquerading as conservatives are the problem.

So like driftglass and BlueGal have been saying, conservatives are lying to us and those dirty liberals were right all along.

Which brings me to my newest bumper sticker idea: