I hereby call for less bipartisanship

Yes, you heard me. I hereby call for the new Democratic Congress to be as partisan as they need to be, without apology.

I'm starting to get rather annoyed that the national press seems to have decided that the Democrats ran on a platform of restoring bipartisanship to government, and that the message the voters sent in overwhelmingly electing Democrats to Congress (not a single Democratic incumbent lost, while Republicans lost a lot of previously "safe" seats) was actually that they wanted everyone in the government to play nice with each other.

That strikes me as complete and utter nonsense.

I mean, that's basic logic, isn't it? You don't overwhelmingly elect one party if the message you're trying to send is that you want both parties to play nice. You only do that if your objective is to stop the party in power from doing what it's been doing. This was pretty clearly a response to the public's losing faith in the Republicans and trying to put a check on their power. In that sense, it's a mandate for as much partisanship as possible.

Furthermore, the Democrats didn't talk about bipartisanship during the campaign. They only started promising to work with the other side after the election, as a goodwill gesture to the Republicans whose electoral backsides they'd just kicked. Logically, then, people couldn't possibly have voted for them because of their promises of bipartisanship.

Of course, this is just another instance of a Republican talking point being accepted by the mainstream media as if it were an objective framing of the truth. But it's always seemed to me like the Washington media establishment values "bipartisanship" and government harmony more than the public does. In fact, they often seem to value it as an and unto itself, which it isn't.

David Broder, the "dean" of the national press corps, wrote multiple columns singing the praises of the Iraq Study Group before their plan was even unveiled--not because of any expected result, but because it was soooo good to see members of both parties working together toward some objective. It seemed entirely beside the point to him what that objective was--never mind that the issue at hand was one of life and death, what really mattered was that the people at Washington cocktail parties get along.

(It's worth noting, incidentally, that the sages of our national news media seemed untroubled by "partisanship" when Newt Gingrich was calling Democrats a bunch of sick traitors, when the Republican Congress was shutting Democrats out of the debate entirely for years, when Clinton got impeached for nakedly partisan reasons, when George Bush was insinuating that Democrats wanted al Qaeda to kill us all...but suddenly, when Democrats seize power, these same sages are apoplectic over the idea that Democrats might be too "partisan." Once again--liberal media, my tailfeathers.)

Look, bipartisanship is only a good thing if it's in the service of a good idea. If a Democrat and a Republican decide to work together to push me down and take my lunch money, that's "bipartisan." If the Republican tries to do that and the Democrat tries to stop him, that's "partisan strife," but it's also better.

I'd like to see both parties working together for the genuine public good as much as anyone, and I imagine most of the country would, too, but if one party goes completely off the rails and starts pushing terrible policies, it does no one any good for the other party to work with them in a "bipartisan" fashion to enact those terrible policies. And this last election was a reflection of that.

I hope Madame Speaker et al will worry more about what's good for the country than about "bipartisanship."