From CNN today:

Top Republican lawmakers Sunday called on President Obama to change his political strategy, arguing that the passage of a massive stimulus bill on a party-line vote showed he has failed to deliver the “change” he promised.

“If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country’s screwed,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told ABC’s “This Week.” “I know bipartisanship when I see it.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said Obama was off to “a bad beginning,” out of step with the vow of bipartisanship both men made after Obama beat out the Republican presidential nominee for the White House in November.

“It was a bad beginning because it wasn’t what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people, that we would sit down together,” McCain told CNN’s “State of the Union With John King.”

They must really, truly take the American people for fools.

The Republicans, once again, are trying to win over the small group of Americans who don’t actually follow the news. For the rest of us, what we’ve seen in the last three weeks from the GOP has been equal parts disgracefulness, dishonesty and cowardice.

Obama did not have to include them in the development of this bill. He did not have to listen to their concerns and their suggestions. They LOST the confidence of the American people after 8 years of failed policies, corruption and outright deception. But he did it anyway, and will continue to do so because that is the essence of what bipartisanship is - putting aside your differences to come together for the common good.

We know who the Republican leadership is and how that element of governing is missing from their diminishing set of tools. They are the people who walked lockstep behind George W. Bush his entire Presidency, with maybe a moment or two of disagreement not worth mentioning. They are the people who encouraged pushing the Democrats out of their discussions, the ones who called them traitors despite the fact that they went along with most of their bills, including Bush’s enormous tax cuts. They are the one’s who rammed through legislation in the past while threatening the “nuclear option” if democrats make any small attempt to foster a discussion through filibuster. They are the people who porked up legislation to the point where it was a party every time Bush signed them off.

They are the people who spend 8 years doing this, creating division, eating up the surplus, playing politics every step of the way. And they have the gaul to criticize Obama for not including EVERYTHING they wanted in the bill?

They got their tax cuts. They removed funding for green technologies and removed a good amount for education. Some of it necessary, but some of it removed through the ACTUAL bipartisanship offered by the democrats.

And still, after all that, they cowardly turn their backs on this bill - at a moment when the American people need help, any kind of help - because their politics will not allow them to seek the greater good.

McCain, Graham, Boehner and the like - you have severely worn out your welcome with us. You possess no moral authority to make any requests, let alone demands, regarding an economy you screwed up royally. All you seem to have left is your petty complaints and your inability to do anything but obstruct.

Well, we know what you’re doing. And it ain’t gonna work this time.

Bipartisanship is a two way street. When you set a line of fire between the two sides, you deserve to be ignored.

Politics bipartisanship, Lindsay Graham complaints, McCain, republican lies, republicans stimulus bill

Back during Reagan, I found myself in a continuous debate with friends who aggressively defended the Iran Contra situation. It was the first time I really had to study up before a discussion. The studying wasn’t simply to allow myself the opportunity to grasp details and facts quicker in the heat of argument, but to actually HAVE facts and defend them.

You see, most of my friends on the conservative side, as now, react to issues based purely on emotion. What I’ve always found disheartening is that the conservative politicians feed into this. My earliest memories of Nixon was his sometimes not so subtle attacks on the counter-culture and his call for the “silent majority” to speak up through his candidacy. Reagan, on the other hand, was an optimistic minimalist - he saw little sense in trying to get the electorate to understand even some of the complexities of the issues of the day and would rather sell them a simple idea - tax cuts and trickle down economics, Kadafi as the new Hitler, Granada as the new battleground for freedom.

Bush has been a multiplication of all the worst aspects of Reagan and Nixon. He fed us fear as a motivator, simplified complex economic tools such as tax cuts into across-the-board disasters that have enriched that top 1 percent, trickled very little down, and left the rest of us holding the financial bag. He asked for no sacrifices during war, and instead prodded us to do what he’s been doing his entire life - spend, spend, spend, don’t worry about the debt (daddy will help you out) and forget about personal financial responsibility in any area of your life. Wars are black and white, you have enemies and friends and nothing in between. Saddam isn’t the new Hitler, all Muslims are. Believe what I tell you because you can trust me. Science and complex thinking are for wimps. Go with your gut.

Well, here we are 8 years later. This compassionate conservative has divided the country so severely we are on the verge of ruin emotionally, economically, militarily and ethically. Obama has a tough hill to climb to get us out.

Unfortunately for him, the dead-enders still think they have a place in this process, demands they can make. Well, as far as I’m concerned, when you screw everything up as much as you have you deserve no place at the table until you can learn to get along with everyone else. Neocons live today in a fantasy world where time has stood still and our current President is just another Jimmy Carter with a slightly darker complexion. They STILL feel they are right in all areas (despite the fact that the entire Bush agenda has lead to multi-pronged failures), that McCain would have won had it not been for the media, and the Democrats haven’t changed one iota since the 1960s. What they don’t know and can’t understand is that the country has moved past them, that they are the relics of a different time and the old way of politics has no place in the future.

Sure, things change little in the short term, but at least now we can see the horizon past the moral and ethical wasteland given to us by the Bush-Cheney-DeLay-Boehner-Frist crew. So necons - stay where you are at your own peril. We really don’t care anymore about your ideas. They are bankrupt.

Politics, Verbal Paintball bush disaster, bush failure, McCain, neocons, Obama, republican fantasy world