{"id":11001,"date":"2012-05-18T10:59:51","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T15:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=11001"},"modified":"2012-05-18T15:42:04","modified_gmt":"2012-05-18T20:42:04","slug":"dont-blame-democrats-for-hyper-partisanship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/05\/18\/dont-blame-democrats-for-hyper-partisanship\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t blame Democrats for hyper-partisanship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Leonard Pitts Jr. in <em>The Miami Herald<\/em> has the commentary <a title=\"The Miami Herald article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mcclatchydc.com\/2012\/05\/18\/148999\/commentary-dont-blame-democrats.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Don&#8217;t blame Democrats for hyper-partisanship<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I bring attention to it for two reasons. One is that Leonard Pitts, Jr. points out that<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>this is not a problem caused by partisans \u201cat both ends of the political spectrum.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Further,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One cannot fix a problem one will not face. And the new cultishness of the Republican Party is certainly a problem. It should concern anyone who thinks democracy is best served when political parties offer coherent alternatives and hash them out in the marketplace of ideas \u2014 something the GOP no longer does.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The second reason for featuring this article, is the comment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In their new book, <em>It\u2019s Even Worse Than It Looks<\/em>, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein argue that the GOP has \u201cbecome an insurgent outlier \u2014 ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is a book that reader RichardH has mentioned to me.\u00a0 I had not looked into the book nor listened to an interview with the authors because I never expected a right-wing ideologue such as Norman J. Ornstein would ever have conceded what seems to be the premise of the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leonard Pitts Jr. in The Miami Herald has the commentary Don&#8217;t blame Democrats for hyper-partisanship. I bring attention to it for two reasons. One is that Leonard Pitts, Jr. points out that this is not a problem caused by partisans \u201cat both ends of the political spectrum.\u201d Further, One cannot fix a problem one will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11001"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11005,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11001\/revisions\/11005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}