Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Parallel Universe Inhabited by Democrats

That's really the only explanation I can come up with for posts like this one.

Bush got nearly all of the appointments he wanted along with a blind eye turned to rampant illegal surveillance. I can’t think of a single case outside of SCHIP where there was a substantial ideological debate that would fall into the category of gridlock inducing partisanship. “Liberal” Democrats routinely fell in line and cow-towed to any and all Republican demands not to mention the fact that several Bush proposals were stymied by Republicans and not Democrats. That’s why I find this pearl-clutching by the wingnuts over the trad and ritualistic kid-glove treatment Obama is receiving from the press completely baffling considering that during the Bush administration the media ran right along with the idea that anyone who disagreed with the president’s policies was a seditious coddler of terrorists. How dare they question our Commander In Chief during war time!? The press has always been more deferential to Republican presidents than it is to Democrats and pretending that the media is perpetually stacked against them has been part of the radical right MO for the past twenty years and it is absolutely ridiculous to recommend bipartisan ship after eight years of the most partisan administration this country has ever seen.

I've been blogging the last two years, which has included post after post after post after post with examples of biased and negative coverage in the MSM and the fact is, the MSM is overwhelmingly positive when it covers Democrats and overwhelmingly negative when it covers Republicans. I'm not just talking about campaign coverage, which was so lopsided that only a complete idiot would believe the coverage was fair. No, I'm talking about coverage of every issue for the eight years George W. Bush has been president.

Let's put the above mentioned statement in perspective: When Democrats swept Congress in 2006, Nancy Pelosi promised civility and bipartisanship. But that's not what we got. Instead, we got massive spending bills, calls to slowly bleed our military dry (and thus lose the war in Iraq), and the filibustering of Bush's judicial nominees. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have tried repeatedly to steamroll over Republicans and the sitting president by threatening, insulting and cajoling them at every turn. This includes multiple attempts to defund the war (without taking the blame for it) and rolling back various measures such as the Patriot Act and FISA laws.

If Democrats haven't accomplished these things, it's not for a lack of trying. The fact is that a presidential veto has prevented a variety of disasterous and foolish legislation from becoming law. But in no way does that constitute Democrats rolling over (or, more laughably, the press fawning over Republicans).

This is why I think Democrats inhabit a parallel universe, one where Democrats haven't been in charge of Congress for two years and are responsible for what has come out of it. Rather, they must live in a world, like those set in comic books, where Republicans are always evil geniuses who seemingly defy all laws, both manmade and natural, to win every battle until the end when Captain Democrat figures out how to save the world. Because in the real world, the MSM has never been nicer to Republicans than Democrats and Dems have run Congress like the Keystone Cops. And arguments that contain hyperbole like "eight years of the most partisan administration this country has ever seen" just sounds like someone who's been out of touch for a while.