Meet Norm Ornsein and Thomas Mann. The former is the last sane guy at the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute and the latter, one of the last sane guys at the more liberal Brookings Institute. They team up to go Mario and Luigi on the "Both Sides Do It!" false equivalence Village nonsense and
actually drop the blame at the feet of the GOP.
How the article got into the Washington Post of all places is beyond me (as the Kaplan Daily is arguably the most egregious example of the Village Temple of the Sensible Centrist), but let's see how far this rabbit hole goes:
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
Oh, those are fightin' words, boys...and yet any objective observer would have to agree that those two clowns are indeed the major reason the GOP has been completely intractable. (I would have added Limbaugh, Rove, and Cheney myself.) Granted, Ornstein and Mann have to get their shot in at the Donks:
Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.
The party of Poindexter versus the party of Genghis Khan, indeed. But if the worst thing they muster about the Dems is that they're acting like normal Dems and that the GOP is off their collective rockers, well, it's only like many of us have been saying since what, 2007 now?
If not longer. Hope these guys aren't banished from the internet for telling the truth. Meanwhile, compare that
directly with
this David Gergen and Michael Zimmerman article at CNN.com.
Sens. Richard Lugar and Orrin Hatch -- both stalwarts of the GOP who have committed apostasy by trying to work across party lines -- face primaries this season that imperil their survival: A poll Thursday morning found Lugar down 5 points to a tea party-backed challenger in Indiana, and Hatch failed to secure a 60% supermajority at his party's convention in Utah, sending his race to a primary. Only two years ago in Utah, another stalwart Republican who had worked with Democrats, Bob Bennett, was deposed by an ideologically purer primary challenger.
In the House, meanwhile, the once-robust cadre of "Blue Dog Democrats" -- moderate to conservative members of the liberal party -- has been winnowed out, with two more members (Reps. Jason Altmire and
Tim Holden of Pennsylvania) defeated in primaries this past Tuesday by opponents from their left flanks.
As of 2010, there were as many as 54 Blue Dogs, but the midterms knocked their caucus down to 26. With retirements and primaries, that number will probably be well below 20 by next January -- an effect that further turns Democrats into the party of the left.
Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, both sides do it, literally. Both sides are equally guilty, and Gergen's stupid, moronic tripe is the Village Mantra. "It's too bad that we can't have more Democrats who courageously vote exactly like Republicans and Republicans who return the favor and courageously vote exactly like Republicans but don't call Obama names 100% the time. We need more of these courageous people who will bravely drag the country to the center right."
You know who we need less of in Congress? Orrin Hatch and Tim Holden. And good riddance to the both of them. Hatch co-sponsored the Violence Against Women Act nearly 20 years ago and he voted against it last week. Bye.
I'll lose no sleep over the loss of "moderates" like that.
