Bipartisanship = Date rape

That's what Conservative guru Newt Gingrich was alleged to have said in the early days of the great "Conservative Revolution" of 1994. It is easy to believe the phrase to be the hallmark of the conservative efforts of those days because it was truly a "take no prisoners" situation. Conservatives believed the battle against William Jefferson Clinton was truly an existential battle. As far as they were concerned, the very soul of the nation was at stake.

So consider this proposition:

14 years later, George W. Bush has left the nation in shambles economically, militarily and diplomatically. It would seem incumbent on the remaining few avowed conservatives out there to start pleading for bipartisan collegiality in both houses of congress (just like the crocodile tears they shed after the Democratic victories in 2006?) in order to preserve some remnants of their precious "Conservative Revolution".

But they aren't....via our friend Digby

She cites that Obama is actually practicing "post-partsianship" as opposed to just speaking about it. She claims that Obama needs the good will of the right/conservatives/Republicans in order to straighten out the mess they have created over the past seven (going on eight) years.

The mess is outlined starkly in Thomas Franks book...here's a snippet via Digby

Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington. …

… The conservatism that speaks to us through its actions in Washington is institutionally opposed to those baseline good intentions we learned about in elementary school.

Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job. Repairing it will require years of political action.

Get that? It will require years of political action...but Digby points out:

That's not going to happen through compromise because they don't want it repaired and will do everything in their power to stop it. The nature of the opposition makes compromise and consensus impossible, even if it were desirable, which I submit that it is not since the amount of repair that must be done is so enormous that there literally isn't time to play these games.

snip

By the time these guys are done, the only acceptable bipartisanship will be the Republican kind --- the kind that results in more wars and tax cuts and deregulation. The "compromise" is that we might not have quite as many as we have under a Republican.