Is President-elect Obama really ready for the GOP vision of "postpartisanship"? The one and only Digby explains it all for us -- it's "date rape"

Yes, Smilin' Chuck Grassley is leaving the Senate,
but he leaves behind such deep political thinkers as
John Kyl and Dr. Tom Coburn. Ah, bipartisanship!

"Obama may have won on a promise of postpartisanship, but the Republicans never signed on to the memo, did they?"

-- Digby

by Ken

In a moment, we're going to have Digby explain for us, as I've never heard anybody explain it, the Republican concept of "bipartisanship." Hint: The central image -- a handy and dare I say indelible one -- is "date rape."

Yesterday I whomped as hard as I could on Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (not nearly hard enough, I'm afraid; I'm sure he didn't feel a thing), for his monumentally hyhypocritical declaration of intent to stall the nomination of Attorney General-designate Eric Holder -- this from the man who as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee not only happily signed on to but smilingly waved on the Justice Dept. tenures, respectively disastrous and catastrophic, of "Honest John" Ashcroft and Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales. Their collective misrule must surely rank as one of the low points in the history of the American republic.

The next thing I knew, Republicans were piling on -- people like outgoing Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and truly neanderthal life forms like Arizona's John Kyl and Oklahoma's "Dr. Tom" Coburn. The ominous suggestion is that they plan to make the Holder nomination as bloody as they can for the incoming administration, in all likelihood as a mere opening salvo in an all-out war on that administration.

This doesn't especially surprise me, but it still sends tremors through me, as a foretaste of what's to come. Barack Obama, God bless him, really seems to believe in his vision of "postpartisanship." He really seems to think we can solve even our biggest and most intractable problems by just putting our heads together and coming up with "bipartisan" solutions.

As I pointed out a number of times during the campaign, Obama apparently thinks the reason no progress has made with problems like the Iraq occupation and the health-care crisis and now the economic meltdown is that nobody ever thought of holding hands and making nice.

I think he really believes this, and that's what scares me. Because we've had eight years of the Bush regime to observe the right-wing concept of "bipartisanship," much ballyhooed by right-wingers and their enablers in the Village media. While they do everything in their power to crush us like the maggots they think we are, they will allow us to sign on to any of their wacko ideologies. Oh, they'll keep right on trying to crush us, but have a nice day anyway.

What's going on with the gathering storm of GOP opposition to the Holder nomination? Digby has graciously given me permission to pass on this amazing explanation she dashed off last night for a bunch of blogospheric colleagues. I can't imagine anyone explaining these dynamics any better:

There is nothing mysterious about any of this. This is just how Republicans act as an opposition party. It's about tying Holder to Clinton to Obama (and "Chicago politics" and "smell tests" and "honor") and creating an ongoing sense that there is something fetid and corrupt about Obama even though there's nothing specific anyone can point to. They simply see the destruction of Obama as the most expedient way to return to power and they will go after him personally and obstruct his agenda at every possible turn.

They really do believe that bipartisanship is date rape -- they have done for the past 30 years. And there aren't any Republican political professionals who didn't come up in that school. To them, this is what politics are all about. Since they have paid no price for this beyond a fairly even ebb and flow of electoral politics there's been no reassessment of their methods. Dems don't play the blame game. Republicans do.

Dealing with a ruthless obstructionist opposition party that always operates in bad faith and never misses an opportunity to weaken the president was always going to be part of Obama's challenge. (And it doesn't matter if the public hates it -- the whole point is to wear them down until it's just too exhausting to resist.)

If you haven't been watching Fox the last couple of days you are missing something. It's all there.

Wow! Let me just repeat one paragraph:

"They really do believe that bipartisanship is date rape -- they have done for the past 30 years. And there aren't any Republican political professionals who didn't come up in that school. To them, this is what politics are all about. Since they have paid no price for this beyond a fairly even ebb and flow of electoral politics there's been no reassessment of their methods. Dems don't play the blame game. Republicans do."

Do you get it? More important, do you think the president-elect does? (We have Digby's OK to forward this explanation of Republican bipartisanship as far and wide as we can. If anyone can get it to him, it's worth a shot.)


[Coming up: Howie's airport comment on Rep. Darrell Issa's announced approach to bipartisanship as new ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.]

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