[Overpaid Slacker]

OK, I didn't want to hijack TW's thread, but a few folks have mentioned this "time for W to bring people together" idea.

I've got no problem with the idea, other than, well, everything it implies about the last 4 years. It takes two to mend fences.

There is no way on God's green Earth that W could've united the country these past 4 years, other than caving into every Dem demand. The Dem's were angry -- stark, raving, sputtering insane, some of them -- and there was no force known to man that was going to draw them to W's bosom, plain and simple.

Just as a fer instance, W worked very closely with BigFatTedKennedy on education, raising spending 60% (from memory, but it's about that) AND giving BFTK an award of some sort for his service and work on the project.

How did BFTK respond -- with some of the foulest, nastiest, and often most spectacularly false shrieking criticism of W and the administration. OK, BFTK, we get it, you disagree... you think W should personally be drawn and quartered for Abu Ghraib, or based on even allegations about Gitmo. And in pandering to your most rabid contingent you've got to refer to W and his admin as Taliban, rather than disagree like the statesman you want us to think you are.

The Dems didn't want to be united, they wanted to be angry, self-righteous and snivelling (not all of them, but I'm trying to make a point here, and all it really takes is the extreme polarization of the radical left to pull the would-be united apart). Every single thing W did, or didn't do that Dem's thought he should've done, they seized upon with unholy sanctimony, and unprecedented complicity to publicize.

This is not to say that W did everything right, or that he should be immune from criticism, but even you partisan lefties have to admit that shrieking -- not merely disagreeing, but shrieking about EVERY SINGLE fault or flaw, real or perceived, was not exactly an overture of peace.

This was going on well before Iraq, well before 9/11 when W couldn't get his cabinet confirmed, so I don't believe there was one instant where "he turned his back" on bipartisanship. It wasn't there to begin with from the other side. In fact, as I said earlier, unless W became a Liberal, there was just going to come one time, one issue, where any lefty could say "see!!! we'll never get along, look at how he acts!!!" Well, it's a fact of life that a president from the other party is not going to do/support what you want all -- or even most -- of the time.

OK, enough. The point is, that Dems are going to have to want to unite. They've got to accept that they're a minority power, whose agenda is wildly more popular with the media than with the public that elects them. They've got not to set terms like a manipulative passive aggressive broad, where if W doesn't do what the D's want where and when, the Woman Scorned routine begins all over again.

Here's hoping, genuinely, that that'll happen, but it'll take some soul-searching by the Dems and quieting their most radical elements.

JP