"Drink Entire

against the madness of crowds.”

(Yeah I’ve used this quote before. But I say, when thieving from the best, why be less than shameless?)

What Ezra has up here should be required reading as a balm for the Broderite claptrap that consumes so many tony pages and so much bandwidth. Now that would be some gen-u-ine balance.

It is a thoughtful, sturdily constructed, two-fisted palate cleanser and a tonic against the dead, lightless weight of MSM Conventional Wisdom that is so wrong, so often and yet so touted and so ubiquitous that it sometimes seems to smother the simple truth under blanket after mildewy blanket of twaddling irrelevance.

Ezra hits this right in the sweet spot as he explains how the collapse of the Bush presidency has made Dubya, in a sense, invincible.

I’m just dropping in bits and snips here because you really should read the whole of it.

File under: When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

The Invincible President

How the supposed "uniter" consolidated his power by fostering division.

Ezra Klein | July 5, 2007 | web only

"President Bush's decision to commute the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. was the act of a liberated man," wrote The New York Times. "A leader who knows that, with 18 months left in the Oval Office and only a dwindling band of conservatives still behind him, he might as well do what he wants."

If the Buddha and Machiavelli had a child, this would be the type of liberation he'd speak about: Liberation from the suffering imposed by democratic checks and balances.
…

The Gautamachiavelli?

The Universe shudders.

Onward.

…
It is a liberation George W. Bush has pursued with a single-minded vigor. From the beginning, he has consciously sought to govern from division, realizing early on that popularity can actually constrain an administration, and consensus is just another word for compromise.

And now, in the latter half of his second term, at 20-some percent in the polls, he has achieved full liberation from shackles of public opinion and congressional approval. In his solitude, he is virtually invincible.

Among the first to notice this strange strategy was The Prospect's own Mark Schmitt. Back in 2004, despite the GOP's control of all three branches of government, he observed that they seemed to be passing legislation by surprisingly slim margins.

…

What the Republican Party, under the leadership of Bush and Rove, realized, was that they didn't have to campaign on their legislation. They could campaign on the perfidy of the opposition.

And if that was to be your strategy, there was no sense in letting the other party sign onto your legislation -- that would actually undermine your electoral appeal. So bills that could have garnered Democratic votes were twisted until no Democrat could, in good conscience, say "aye." Perhaps the best example of this strategy was the Department of Homeland Security, a Democratic idea that the White House first opposed, and then inserted a union-busting provision into, so Democrats had to fight against a broadly popular idea that they, at base, supported. That bill could have passed with overwhelming support. It was a conscious decision to make it a partisan issue so it could be used as a cudgel in the 2002 elections.

…
After the Democrats took Congress, George W. Bush …could have resolved to spend his final years pushing policy forward, and created genuinely bipartisan commissions to resolve Medicare's financing crisis, to clean the tax code and reform the Alternative Minimum Tax, and to end the war in Iraq. Instead, he did precisely the opposite.

To understand how, it's necessary to appreciate George Bush's almost unique circumstances. There are generally a couple democratic checks on a president's power: his desire to retain political capital with Congress in order to pass legislation; his need to retain popularity in order more effectively advocate for his agenda; and his wish to improve the fortunes of his party and ensure the ascension of his vice-president.

Bush is constrained by none of those.

…

Dubya has left the building...

...and entered the Bunker.

And rather than a freak of nature or an ideological malfunction, the Dubya Presidency has been nothing less the dark, stupid heart of the GOP made perfectly manifest. From his rapacious usurpation of imperial powers, to a pet Republican Congress that obediently cast aside their vital legislative and oversight responsibilities without a backwards glance and then eagerly re-cast themselves as his fawning royal court, this bloody, corrupt, incompetent, debt-ridden, looter's-paradise final chapter of the worst presidency in history is the apotheosis of Modern Conservativism.

Beyond than that, I have nothing to add to Ezra's fine work other than we would do well to consider how to operationalizing his hypothesis.

Perhaps using this simple frame:

1. Any reportage on the rancor and venomous partisanship that is destroying our public discourse that does not lay the blame squarely at the feet of the GOP generally, and the Bush Administration specifically, is corrupt and fraudulent reporting on its face.

2. Any individual journalist, pundit or elected official who attempts to allocate responsibility for this meltdown in the public square onto both political parties and movements equally should be considered a liar and a collaborator with those who are trying to destroy this country from within, at least until it is proven they aren’t just idiots.

3. To salvage our democracy, the most immediate and imperative act of must be to lance, disinfect, delouse, amputate, cauterize and reformat massive sections of the conservative movement and the GOP. Any solution to the continued and deliberate poisoning of the well of public discourse that does not stipulate to this is a lie and a trap.

Now, wasn’t that tasty?

So why not go over and dine on the whole of it instead of just nibbling on the grocery aisle giveaway samplers here...