On August 31, 1939, Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichsreingebotsamt in Münich, said:

Peace is still attainable!  All the Poles, Norwegians, French, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and British need to do is start goose-stepping, killing Jews and working with us on the whole Lebensraum thing! 

Lavrencz Szdurdzevanski, writing for the Sztrela-Trzybuna Warszawy (Warsaw Star/Tribune), wrote in a column later that day:

Where is the spirit of bipartisanship that animated our anscestors?  Like when former Governor Elmzar Anderczszon worked with the Russians during the hundreds of years they controlled us?  No; our partisan government will no doubt do its best to not cooperate with our neighbors!

And we all know how that turned out, right? [1]

———-

In a similar vein, the Democrats Dthink, mirabile dictu, that their lives would be easier if Republicans put “partisanship” aside and did their work for them:

Congressional Democratic leaders said Wednesday that Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch is a sign that Republicans should become more like, well, Democrats.

“I say to Republicans in America, take back your party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters. “The party of protecting the environment, the party of individual rights, the party of fairness.”

Pelosi, like much of the Minnesota political establishment, wants a return to the good ol’ days of the sixties and seventies – when Republicans basically acted like Democrats with better suits. It’s explained very well in the Wall Street Journal’s obit for Jack Kemp is the most cogent explanation of what Lori Sturdevant, the Minnesota Establishment and the Mainstream Media believe Republicans should be that I’ve ever seen (emphasis added):

A celebrated pro quarterback, Kemp was an unlikely intellectual. Yet amid the economic troubles of the 1970s, he immersed himself in the details of fiscal and monetary policy. Along with a handful of others, many of whom wrote for this newspaper, Kemp became a champion for the classical economic ideas that challenged the Keynesian orthodoxy of that time. He also had to mount an insurgency inside the Republican Party, which for decades had been dominated by budget-balancers who saw their fate mainly as moderating and paying for liberal excess.

That’s what they want.  And I’m concerned that we’re seeing signs of the same thing from Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney on their “Listening Tour”. 

Look – there’s a time for compromise and some degree of cooperation. That time is not when you’re defining what your party stands for.

And not to Nancy Pelosi (and everyone who thinks as she does): partisanship is necessary for democracy. 

[1] Well, OK – the speech and the editorial never happened.  It’s “fake but accurate”.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Conservatism, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.