Something We Can All Agree on; Let's Fight!

William Rusher rights a surprisingly fair minded article over at Townhall today about partisanship and how it is our birthright as a nation.

Why don't boxers embrace in the center of the ring, agree not to fight, and split the prize money 50-50? The answer is, of course, that we are looking forward to the fight, and would rightly be outraged if it didn't occur. To be sure, politics is a far more serious matter, and it would presumably be nice, as a purely theoretical proposition, if those who participate in it would agree to work together to solve the nation's problems.

But the Founding Fathers weren't fools, and they knew that it was inevitable that serious men (and women) would disagree profoundly on the proper solutions to all sorts of problems. So they carefully designed a system in which such differences would be argued out among the various factions, and then a decision would be taken on each issue by the simple process of putting the various proposed solutions up to a vote.

. . . Yes, the brawls between the Republicans and the Democrats can get tiring, and both are routinely guilty of posturing just to look better than their rival. But that way we at least get to see what's going on. It's when harmony (and silence) reign on Capitol Hill that the voters have most cause to worry.

This is better than Jonah Goldberg's article from last week on the same subject by virtue of actually being evenhanded. In other words he doesn't try to pretend that the partisanship is mostly the Democrats fault.

Of course it is interesting to speculate on why these writers are trying to make a virtue of partisanship; I suspect it's because they don't have anything else right now. This President isn't going to make peace with the Democrats; he's got no incentive to.