“SHUT-UP AND LET US RUN THE COUNTRY,” THEY EXPLAINED

[Geee]

Powerline:

Don’t miss Peter Robinson’s take-down of a piece in the Washington Post by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, two veteran purveyors of Washington conventional wisdom. Mann and Ornstein fret that (you’ll never guess this) our politics are broken and that (don’t be shocked) this is the fault of Republicans. They write:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

But, as Peter points out, the positions advanced by the GOP are not ideological outliers. Republicans rode them to a resounding victory in 2010. Polls show that many of these positions continue to command more support than the contrary views of the Democrats. This is certainly true when it comes to the such key issues as Obamacare and, broadly speaking, budget deficits.

Meanwhile, Mann and Ornstein are oblivious to the irony of attacking a Party for “dismissing the legitimacy of its political opposition,” while denouncing that Party as an outlier that doesn’t care about facts, evidence, and science. It is the two veteran Washington think-tank denizens who are attempting to win a debate their side may be losing by declaring the other side to be the bad guys.

As for “scorn” of compromise, Mann and Ornstein overlook the fact that President Obama, needing no Republican congressional support to pass his initial agenda, did not seriously attempt to work with Republicans during his first two years. A Party that won’t reach across the aisle as far as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, as the Dems didn’t when it came to Obamacare, is no position to claim — or have others claim on its behalf –that the opposition’s intransigence is the root of the absence of compromise.