Wednesday, September 18, 2013


Is Bipartisanship A Myth?




This was originally an online conversation, in the form of individual posts and replies, regarding an article in The Huffington Post. The link above will take you to the article.
There was a time when politics was just a difference of opinion on the best route for America to take, not a dogmatic religion that cannot suffer the existence of others.

Well said.

Politics is a business just like anything else; your competition of one day may be your ally the next. Moreover, politics is also theatre and in a world overwhelmingly populated by lawyers whose world is also theatre, partisanship and bipartisanship, have all the stability of the sands of Araby.


ycplum
There was a time when politicians on both sides of the aisle recognized that their differences were really about degrees so they negotiated a compromise that was acceptable.  Now, there are no degrees, but black or white. Both sides demand all or nothing. Our government was not designed for this and cannot survive if this continues for very long.

No, it can't but that's not where change has to start.

After WWII, America changed. An individually self-supporting, self-reliant public saw the good times roll and decided they always would. And should. Who'd keep them rolling? Why, the government of course. We could afford it, individually and nationally. We'd won the war; we'd saved the world; we were ENTITLED to it.

As we rolled, we exported that sense of entitlement when the US started rebuilding and "helping" the rest of the world. Whether we should have or not is a subject for another day. What is important here is that we and the rest of the world came to expect it and WE ALLOWED IT!

Then along came Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Environmental Rights, LGBT Rights, Criminal's Rights, Children's Rights and Victim's Rights, which combines them all into one great entitled horde of "VICTIMS".

With all those Rights, which I'm not attacking so leave me alone, ethnicity crept in. I'm proud to be Irish/Norwegian. Yep, that's me, born to pillage. However, I was raised to be proud of being American FIRST, last and always.

Now everybody has Rights but nobody has responsibility ... except the GOVERNMENT. Let THEM drive the bus, let THEM burp the baby. While every group scrambles for their RIGHTS.

Separately.


Now it's the National Separatist Victim's Rights Movement. Our politicians resisted the trend longer than almost anyone else, longer than I thought they could or would.

Freedoms are never really taken, they're GIVEN AWAY. I'm a Rational Anarchist; I don't believe that we need any laws other than the Golden Rule and a loaded gun in every pot. However, like it or not, we're stuck with government, so cut the politicians some slack. Venal and self-serving they may be but they're still a cut or two above their constituencies.

For bipartisanship to return to government, we must return it to our lives.

 



1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks, though I would disagree on a few points. One, our system has always had black and white disagreements sometimes they were far worse than today. The most obvious being slavery and we know how that turned out, but even the rise of progressive policies resulted in heated fights across the country. These disagreements were so strong Wilson had opponents lynched. It's amazing to go back and read about Wilson and the progressives and how they dealt with their opponents. And that leads to my second disagreement with her thoughts...the current system was designed and implemented well before WW2 and the entitlement mentality was fostered under Teddy and exploded under Wilson.

http://millercenter.org/president/wilson/essays/biography/4