Responding to an earlier post here, Steve Benen has more on
Republican shenanigans on cap-and-trade - I hadn’t known that cap-and-trade was an explicit part of the McCain-Palin platform in 2008 - and examples from many other fields. Benen’s headline sums up the problem:
NEGOTIATING WITH THOSE
WHO OPPOSE THEIR OWN PRINCIPLES
Why is it that advocates of bipartisanship such as David Broder seem never to criticize this tactic, and just keep complaining that the Democrats are failing to be bipartisan as long as Repubicans bloc-vote against their own ideas when Democrats embrace them?
“cap-and-trade was an explicit part of the McCain-Palin platform in 2008″
Yeah, but that was two years ago. A lot has happened since then (Michael Jackson died, Spirit rover is stuck on Mars, Lakers won a NBA championship, my brother-in-law purchased a new pair of shoes).
So it’s understandable that Republicans might have changed their views.
As for David Broder, his embrace of bipartisanship is purely a math fetish, or rather, a math-phobia. He’s extremely disturbed by bimodal distributions.
a fast read, “How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer, will answer the Broder question.