TIme For Some Petty Partisanship

Kevin Williamson in National Review comes perilously close to my riff on people who think being “Moderate” is, itself, a good thing:

Bipartisanship is desirable not because the best course is likely to be found at the midpoint between two extremes: The man who drinks to excess every day is a drunk, and so is the man who does so every other day. There is no compromise between fidelity and infidelity. When presented with a good idea and a bad one, there is no point in being a little bit stupid for the sake of compromise.

Which is a lot like my saying: “Moderation for its own sake is like getting a choice between ‘being beaten to death with a baseball bat, and living a long happy life’, and compromising on a traumatic brain injury”.

But he actually has a serious point.   It is high time the GOP descended into some petty partisanship by stopping the petty graft gravy trail that funds the institutional left.

Congress should also target grants and other federal funding directed to political organizations. For example: La Raza, through its banking operations (of course it has banking operations!) has received millions of dollars in federal subsidies…the comptroller general has found routine violations of existing laws against using federal funds for political advocacy and lobbying activities. There is in fact a federal criminal law against using federal appropriations to underwrite lobbying. You will not be surprised to learn that this law — which has been on the books for nearly a century — apparently never has been enforced. “The exact parameters of this law, adopted in 1919, are not precisely known,” writes the Congressional Research Service, “as there appears never to have been an enforcement action or indictment returned based on the provision.” Time to tighten that up. Congress should also adopt a general prohibition on distributing federal settlement funds to nonprofit organizations. Billions of dollars in federal settlements have been directed to “non-victim entities” such as the Urban League and La Raza, which are fundamentally political organizations. If Republicans cannot bring themselves to act out of prudence and principle, then they at least ought to have a sense of self-preservation sufficient to stop funding campaigns against themselves.

It’s time for Republicans to stop letting our sense of fair play be used against us.

Anyway – it verges on a Berg’s Seventh Law reference; for all the left barbers about tax dollars going to support any institution of faith, an insane amount of our money goes to support the left’s religion – leftist power politics (emphasis added):

The Left has a weakness: It is dependent upon government money. It has long accepted that arrangement complacently, on the theory that its friends will generally control the government, if not always at the elected level then at the administrative and bureaucratic level. (The Left has not been wrong about that.) According to the Congressional Budget Office, about 17 percent of all federal outlays take the form of assistance to state and local governments — funds that in turn account for about a quarter of all state and local government spending. A fair portion of that money ends up simply passing through to nonprofits and politically connected contractors who provide dubious “outreach” and “development” services.

The correct term for that is “Graft”.