Atrios (Duncan Bowen Black) normally writes far too little. He is kind of like Daily KOS, providing an outlet for others to rant. But this morning, he wrote something that made me feel marginally better during a month that has been pretty much all bad. Can We End That Era:
For the past couple of decades we’ve all (by “we” I man all the Very Serious People in the chattering classes) bought into the fantasy that all we need to do is pursue Conservative Means to achieve Liberal Ends and everything will be awesome. First of all, those conservative means usually don’t work (I won’t say never, but that discussion is too great for the margin of this blog post). But more importantly, the point of such “compromises” was to actually pass some legislation that might achieve stuff, and was premised on the idea that there were people in both political parties who want to make life better for poor people by improving educational opportunities a bit and maybe help a few more people get decent health insurance. Whether those people in the Republican party ever really existed or if they just mugged for the cameras and the Villagers I don’t know, but they don’t exist any more. Right now we have one political party that is very up front about and proud of their desire to mug everyone in the non-millionaire club, steal all their money, and give it to rich people. It’s time for the other political party to recognize that the era of dumb compromises is over, and if they’d actually come up with a way to help people, instead of a plan to set up a program to provide the incentives to blahblahblahblahblahblah….
Of course, I would note that Democrats no longer believe in doing anything. They only believe in incentives. The new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. The new Republican Party is, well, the old Nazi Party. Heil Romney!
