Bad, Bad Republicans

The American Spectator ^ | July 2, 2012 | James Piereson

[Cincinatus' Wife]

"It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism" - By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

......The authors are two Washington insiders masquerading as "scholars" and, judging by their book, partisan Democrats pretending to be "independents" or "centrists." Both Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have worked in D. C. for more than three decades, and, for the past quarter century, have maintained positions as senior fellows and congressional experts...

This is a bad book in every way that a book can be bad. It is misleading, simplistic in its interpretation, and ignorant of widely known facts that contradict its partisan thesis. Most important, it is just plain wrong. Political debate is not "broken"; it is working much as the founders designed it to work. It is "broken" only from the standpoint of liberals who want to ram their agenda through Congress but cannot do so.....

....THE AUTHORS' MAIN POINT is that the Republican Party has evolved into an ideological "outlier" in a constitutional system that works only through moderation and compromise. "The Republican Party," they write, "has become an insurgent outlier: ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise; unpersuaded [sic] by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." The Republicans in Congress, they say, resemble nothing so much as a parliamentary party unified in opposition to Democrats and committed to their destruction, while the Democrats look more like a traditional American party, with many factions representing a spectrum of opinion.......

....[Mann and Ornstein] propose a series of reforms they think will make it easier for Democrats to overwhelm Republicans in the electoral arena, such as....

[Cincinatus' Wife]

You should read this.

[facedown]

I’m sure that all five left-wing professors who buy and read this book will be very impressed.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

“I’m sure that all five left-wing professors who buy and read this book will be very impressed.”

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465031331/theamericansp-20/

And they’ll be sure to pass along this anti-American ideology, semester after semester, to their students.

[central_va]

THE AUTHORS' MAIN POINT is that the Republican Party has evolved into an ideological "outlier" in a constitutional system that works only through moderation and compromise.

Liberal projection of what the Democrat party has become, a leftist party that tolerates no moderates.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

You should read the reviews:

“What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad? That is the question posed in a powerful and angry new book by two scholars at two respected think-tanks, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.”

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465031331/theamericansp-20/

[Hardraade]

The Democratic Party has evolved into an ideological killer, just as Mao or Stalin. It will have to be put down, if that is even possible.

[ClearCase_guy]

THE AUTHORS' MAIN POINT is that the Republican Party has evolved into an ideological "outlier" in a constitutional system

The Republican Party should embrace the Constitution. Nothing more, nothing less. The current feeling in the media is that the GOP has "changed" and has adopted "radical ideas". Well, if we had spent the last 220 years embracing the Constitution, they couldn't say we had changed and they couldn't call our ideas crazy and extreme. The Constitution is a bridle which is intended to give us Limited Government. We need to get back to that.

[driftless2]

The biggest howler is the one about how Obama and his cohorts are responsible, moderate statesmen and women who are just trying to do the public’s bidding. I used to be a Democrat. I know very well how far left the Dem Party has swung in the last forty-fifty years. JFK would be a moderate Republican in these times.

[csmusaret]

Exactly...Where are all the Bluedog Democrats?

[Verginius Rufus]

There was some event shown on C-SPAN this past weekend which featured these two authors. There were several other people at the head table including E. J. Dionne. As far as I could recognize who they were, they were all liberals (I only watched it for a short time).