Your Brains

Obama made SC an impressive victory, despite all the hee-hawing by ass-pundits about race and gender.

It must be hard, I guess, for wealthy white guys to comprehend that other people can find common ground with someone who differs; they've always been able to find other wealthy white guys to vote for, and work for, and work with, and as friends, so identity politics is their only milieu.

But for the rest of us outside of the wealthy and the Beltway, diversity has been increasingly the norm and finding common ground with someone of differing race, gender, creed or what-have-you isn't all that difficult or unusual. Of course, some people don't LIKE that, and thus the Southern Strategy that has paid such swell dividends for teh Republican Party over the last thirty years; but as anti-American values such as Tolerance, Inclusiveness, and Equality have been slowly eroding the Republic, that bigoted contingent has also been eroding, as well as becoming more potent within the Right. They gave them a home; Now they can just live with the abhorrent monsters they've created.

I still have reservations about Obama, as we've been talking over the last couple of days. Hell, I've got reservations about ALL the Democratic candidates (except Kucinich. He's just crazy enough to WORK!) It's a reflection, I think, of the strength of the field; they differ little in policy and the minor details are the most intransigent.

But, still, all the talk of reaching across the aisle, and respectable compromise, and so on are not going to get us anywhere. The recent flap about the FISA law is a great example. The Democrats, pushed by Harry Reid, were ready to roll over and give this hated President everything he demanded: full, retroactive immunity for the telecoms, himself, and his cronies; and vastly expanded abilitites to use wholesale monitoring technologies to eavesdrop on any Americans he deems, for non-disclosable reasons. But, for the 'reasonable' Republicans, complete capitulation wasn't enough. They also demanded, pissily of course, that the bill be delayed JUST LONG ENOUGH that PissMaster Bush can be pissy in the SOTU speech about 'obstructionist' dems who allow TERRISTS to come BLOW US ALL UP FOREVER!!

As I've said, that's not the behavior of someone who's just waiting for a reasonable hand of compromise to be extended; they're savage primitives who view reasonableness as an opportunity to walk on someone else.  Compromise is weakness; anyone who extends a hand will not bring one back.

Atrios pointed out this morning another example of this style of 'Compromise'