Posted on 05/18/2010 1:45:02 AM PDT by Brandonmark
One of the reasons it's so tough to get things done in Washington these days is that the political center—the place where compromises are forged, and where practical results matter more than ideological divides—is such a lonely place.
Well, guess what? It figures to be even more lonely after this year's congressional election. If you think Washington works badly now, it's just possible the 2010 vote may well add to the capital's polarization, and hence to its dysfunction.
This dynamic will be onfull display Tuesday as voters head to the polls in primaries in a few key states. In Arkansas, moderate Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln is threatened by a challenge from her party's left in the person of Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. In Kentucky, tea-party hero Rand Paul could upend Republican establishment favorite Trey Grayson. In both cases, more moderate candidates could be swept out by forces from the ideological wings.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Let’s not count our chickens before the eggs start hatching, but I hope that the center DOES get lonely after the elections in November. When there’s a right and a wrong, what’s anyone’s excuse for staying on the fence?
Remember the old saying..., "There Ain't Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yella Lines and Dead Armadillos!"
Unfortunately, it's not hard enough to get "things done" in Washington, as witness the passage of that idiot health-care legislation.
Not all things get passed with compromise and bipartisanship -- some things get passed by simple majoritarian (mis)rule.
They do too much already and have made, and still make, too many laws; each one eroding what little freedom and liberty we have left.
I want a dysfunctional Washington right now. A totally gridlocked Washington. A Washington where it’s impossible to get anything done. One where cheering for the Nationals means you hate the Redskins. One where the Donkey and the Elephant don’t want to be in the same Zoo. Where Hope and Change is a conversation about Bob and quarters.
As long as there are brilliant, really smart, intellectual, left-loving independents, the center will never be lonely and will always be brilliant.
/s/
IMHO
Everyone not chosing to support one of the poles will, by necessity, be pushed into the "fringe".
The fringe consists of unorganized voters who do not participate in party politics, nor can they due to the mathematics of winning.
The writer of this piece lamenting the loss of something that never was in American politics.
Seventy-seven years of "working together" and "reaching across the aisle" have brought us a federal government the size, cost, intrusiveness, and inefficiency of which could not have been imagined by our grandparents.
We don't need a political center. We need a Revolution of the Right.
There is no center in Dc. There are the Progressive Leftists, those who offer up total surrender to the Leftists dogmas, and those who resist the Progressives.
Tell us oh great “moderates” three things the Leftist leadership of the Democrat Party and 0 have compromised with the Right on in the last year?
Oh but that right, to be “Progressives” means you define “compromise” as everyone else giving in to your emotion based dogmas.
The MSM will give any “moderate” Republican all the air time they what. I call it RINO t.v. ala Juan McAmnesty and Gober Gramnesty hour. The “moderates” become the “spokesmen” for the Republicans. That’s how the game is played. Conservatives get ZERO airtime.
Exactly. The rare ramming through of massively evil legislation, like ObamaCare, is not what does the most damage to America. It's in the compromise between good and evil, where moderates accept a little bit of evil to get along with the liberals, that we are losing America. The road to socialism is a one-way path and the little steps in that direction are the most costly because there are so many of them.
The fewer laws those self-serving bastards can pass, the better.
The fewer laws those self-serving bastards can pass, the better.
Here in Missouri it's dead Skunks!:)
Congressional gridlock is a GOOD thing.
“oh, you’re just so ‘black and white’, aren’t you?”
/libspeak
I explained to my youngins what “compromise” was,
and that we don’t ever compromise with evil.
Not if you want to repeal Obamacare and TARP. You need outright Republican majorities -- 60% of both houses would be nice -- to override Obama's tough Communist veto.
Or are you counting on the Birthers to expose and unfrock Obama, and the Establishment to acquiesce in the removal (by what -- the Old Guard coming from their barracks to throw The One out of the White House?) of a President for gross, ontological-level criminal fraud on the polity?
Then you would have to find a federal judge willing to say that Obama's signature was and is null and void, and that all his executive orders, and all laws signed by him, are null and void as well.
GERALD F. SEIB should have retired years ago.
Good call. Only you are a hopeless pollyanna about what conservatives are going to get. ;)
Theodore White, card-carrying liberal journoscum, was playing that game 40 and 50 years ago with his Making of the President series of post-campaign pseudohistorical books. They were a grift. He always played up the hero 'Rats and the foursquare RiNO's -- the Rockefeller Republicans they were, back then -- and made derogatory comments at every turn about conservatives. If he used the word "primitives" once, he used it 100 times; and all conservative issues were uniformly smeared as "emotion" or "emotional" -- as if conservative GOP'ers didn't know how to think and were both "ignert" and psychologically incontinent.
Nowadays we know the opposite to be the case, and that it is liberals who have engaged in woolly, pie-in-the-sky dreamery and petulant "protestery" for 75 years, much of which began as NKVD and KGB Active Measures initiatives carried forward by hard-line Stalinists tied to the CPUSA and its fronts. But you'd never drag an admission like that out of case-hardened vanguardists like White.
Read one of his introductions some time -- just the introduction -- to get an idea how deeply Red influence had already penetrated U.S. journalism, as you read through White's paeans to vanguardism and the Socialist-Realist imagery he employs to describe the American political process. It's quite discouraging, and reflects the (already, by then) 30 years of assiduous work by Soviet NKVD agents and agitprop assets in American higher education and journalism schools.
Great centrist, isn't he? He's even wearing "centrist camouflage"! lol
Good get.
I’m counting on Obama being kept in check until 2012. There’s no such thing as a veto proof majority for Republicans, ever. Even if they did have 61 Senators (not possible this year) some of them are RINO’s. Obama care will never be repealed. Ever. The only thing we can do is stop the goon from doing more damage.
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