So I was watching this:
And I was growing increasingly angry. Althouse made two ridiculous points and Emily Bazelon did not push back at all. She only said, "That's plausible." No, they're not plausible. Not really.
The first point Althouse made was basically this, quoting Rush Limbaugh:
[T]he Great Unifier's [Obama's] plan, is to isolate... elected Republicans from their voters and supporters. He wants to make the argument about me. He wants to marginalize me. He wants me to be thought of as such an extremist that no mainstream Republican would ever associate with me....
He needs Republicans for cover only on his stimulus package. You gotta understand, folks, he does not need Republican votes. Maybe one or two in the Senate is all he needs and he doesn't need a single Republican in the House to get this done. Now, his definition of bipartisanship is when a bunch of Republicans cave on their own principles and agree with him and give him what he wants. That's magical, that's marvelous, why, that's bipartisanship....
This is a political play to marginalize me so that Republicans are afraid to associate with my ideas or any of us. He wants conservatism, mainstream conservatism to be thought of the way you and I think of communism.
Which is patently ridiculous. Obama's definition of bipartisan is not having his opponents roll over and accept what he wants. The stimulus bill itself illustrates this point. A third of the bill's cost was $275 billion worth of tax cuts, certainly not a Democratic measure. And the final House bill did not have a measure that would have "expand[ed] access to Medicaid-covered family planning services."
This measure, despite all of the Republicans' complaints, made a lot of sense. It would not have given the states any new powers; it would have simply removed a costly, time-intensive waiver process. The provision, if it had passed, was estimated to save $700 million over 10 years.
Now, the bill may have had components that the Republicans didn't like. It wouldn't have been bipartisan if it didn't. And still not one of the 177 House Republicans voted for it. I don't think Obama is the one being partisan.
Why isn't Rush Limbaugh being called the bajoobahead? That's self-evident, an almost ipso-facto truth; he is Bajoobahead #0, if you will. Especially after saying that he hoped Obama would fail. Any conservative American can say that they don't think liberal programs will work. It takes a true patriot to hope that the U.S. will go through four years of suffering so intense that we won't re-elect the guy who wants to institute those liberal policies.
Althouse's second point is this: if Obama is using rhetoric similar to Bush's, why is everyone saying that Obama "signaled a shift...from the Bush administration"? She even referred to this Daily Show clip:
But the answer was sort of embedded in the end of the clip: Obama has not yet done anything that would make his words ring hollow. And he has thus far signaled that he would be willing to sit down, listen, and work with other countries instead of running roughshod over them.
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