- Tuesday, January 13, 2015

To hell with bipartisanship.

As sure as the winter winds are whipping around the Potomac, another very predictable visitor has hit Washington.

It is the call for “bipartisanship.”

The call for bipartisanship, unlike winter, does not show up every year. It only makes its appearance when Republicans take over one or more of the branches of government. The funny thing is, when Democrats take over, there are never calls for this bipartisanship.

One of the biggest problems with bipartisanship is the very definition of the word. It is almost as if that word came straight from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass.” “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

Bipartisan means what the Democrats want it to mean. In their Washington-speak, it means that Republicans surrender their values and compromise while Democrats do not.

Washington Democrats and even liberal Republicans shriek in horror at the idea of partisanship. They have their view of how the nation should be. That is a view that is not shared by most real Americans.

Real Americans would like a choice of something other than what they are getting from government. The solution for liberal Democrats and establishment Republicans is to not give them a choice. Hence, “bipartisanship.”

With bipartisanship, when Republicans surrender, there is only one ideology on the table. That is the ideology of big government as espoused by the Democrats.

Real Americans are pretty fed up with big government. They are tired of seeing their taxes raised endlessly. They are tired of new government rules and regulations that never solve any problems and always manage to make an existing problem worse.

Partisanship is a wonderful concept. Despite the demonization of it by the hysterical Washington elites, it is something real Americans understand.

There are a lot of competing ideas out there. Some are good, some are bad and some are really atrocious. The atrocious ideas are the one’s that come from the Democrats, or as they are known in America, the Party of Treason.

Ideas are worth fighting for.

For Republicans, partisanship equals victory. Democrats and the Washington Establishment went nuts in 1980 over a very partisan candidate. They claimed Ronald Reagan would never be elected. Today he is revered as one of the greatest Presidents of all time.

In 1994, the Establishment again squealed in frantic alarm. Newt Gingrich ran to take control away from the Democrats with a partisan agenda. He won and the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for the next 14 years.  In 2010, the Republicans ran on the Tea Party wave. That, too, was a partisan wave. They won.

Now, after winning a huge mandate, the Republicans again are listening to the siren song of “bipartisanship.” In the spirit of “bipartisanship,” some moderate Republicans, like Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, want to raise the gas tax. Instead of standing on the partisan beliefs they allegedly hold, they want to surrender. Others, drinking the bipartisan Kool-aid want to pass amnesty even though it will mean the Democrats become a permanent majority party in America.

Bipartisanship has gotten America nowhere. All it has done is created problems and then Americans have to rely on the same “bipartisan” politicians, who created the problems in the first place, to fix them.

Einstein warned us that insanity was trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

If that is true, then bipartisanship is the textbook example of insanity.

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