By @BGinKC
If there is a false equivalency to be made, a faulty premise to be promoted, GOP thuggery to be apologized for, or a blatant lie to be told glibly and with ease, the republicans turn to Jack Danforth to do their bidding. And here in Missouri we know Jack, and we know that he will be more than happy to smile and appear reasonable while he hitches a tractor to the Overton Window and drags it to the right.
Former U.S. Sen. John Danforth says “government is broken” because of the uncompromising nature of today’s partisan politics.
The former Republican senator from Missouri retired in 1995 and was known as a political moderate during his 18 years in Washington. But Danforth says the political center has collapsed and “compromise” has become a dirty word among Republicans and Democrats.
Yet Danforth says compromise is exactly what’s needed to fix the U.S. government. He says Republicans need to abandon the idea of no new taxes, and Democrats need to agree to substantial changes in entitlement programs.
Danforth spoke Thursday night at a joint meeting of the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis and the Judicial Learning Center.
That newspapers still, after everything he’s done, continue to call that man a “moderate” is nothing short of journalistic malpractice. The man simply reeks of banality.
He gave the nation Clarence Thomas. You know — the ass in the “black” seat on the Supreme Court — although the conservatives hate them some Affirmative Action with a mighty fury in every other case it’s ever been applied.
By extension, Danforth’s rabid partisanship — his unwillingness to compromise in 1991 — gave us Citizens United and the current political state of affairs. The case can be made that this mess we find ourselves in today is entirely his fault. Some “moderate.”
And as for “compromise” — that is one word I never care to hear again, at least not until republicans get with the program and learn that it means something besides “do things my way and maybe we’ll get along and I won’t destroy your stuff. But maybe not. Still, do things my way anyway because you don’t have any choice in the matter.”
That isn’t compromise, that’s just thuggery.
And when GOP assholes like the Wrong Reverend Danforth talk about Democrats having to compromise on “entitlements” and “reform” what they are telling the Democrats is that they are going to break all their stuff anyway.
There is no need for entitlement reform beyond simply raising the earnings cap so the Social Security tax was paid on earnings over $106,800 and any and all future shortfalls will disappear, as if by magic.
But let’s get back to that word “compromise” that the evil asshats on the right like to pretend means something to them. What was the stimulus if not a “compromise“? It was big enough to prevent a depression, but it wasn’t big enough to bring us out of the recession. It needed to be much larger, but republicans wouldn’t hear of it. They decided on election night 2008 that they would do whatever they had to do to assure that President Obama failed, and they didn’t care how many Americans were hurt in the process, since they deserved it for electing a wog anyways.
And what about the Affordable Care Act? What was that if not a compromise? If it was a liberal fantasy, we would have Medicare-E with the “E” standing for “everyone” and the Democratic Left wouldn’t be wailing still about the lack of a public option. But that didn’t happen and Hamshers Hamsters haven’t stopped squeeking since.
Instead we got a Heritage Foundation/private insurance wetdream with the mandate on individuals instead of employers. The plan that was signed in 2010 is indistinguishable from the plan that the GOP came up with in the 90s to counter “Hillarycare.”
Democrats need to rebuke the Danforths — and McCaskills — who mewl about “compromise” like it was a holy relic of the True Cross. It isn’t. It is a valuable tool in certain instances — namely when everyone has a common goal, like the salvation of the middle class — but when one side wants to destroy and the other side wants to preserve, there is no compromise possible. The goals are mutually exclusive and the relationship is, neccessarily, adversarial. Pretending otherwise is not just stupid, it amounts to surrender, and I don’t own a white flag.