Beyond politics

From DownWithTyranny:

It appears that Senator Obama is striking a chord with his appeal to “post-partisanship.” Who wouldn’t like to see an end to the vicious, violent partisanship of our times? (I’ll tell you who: the ignorance-worshipping sociopaths of the Far-to-the-Nth-Degree Right who created that violent partisanship–utterly deliberately, I believe, for the express purpose of taking over the government and imposing their wingnut sociopathology on the rest of the country. Which come to think of it, they’ve done.)

It sounds lovely. Who doesn’t like to feel good? My problem with most “feel good” movements is that they aren’t based on anything real to feel good about.

It’s hard to see how Senator Obama’s stratospheric soar above partisanship can work. It’s based on the assumption that the reason we haven’t all gotten together and worked all this stuff out together in a spirit of harmony is because nobody ever thought of it. Does anyone really believe this?

Apparently so. But while there are certainly narrow issues–important ones, but narrow ones–where such compromises might be thrashed out in a dialogue unpolluted by the demagoguery of the Far Right, there aren’t all that many such issues, and hardly any of the really crucial issues qualify.

More here. And a related cartoon here.