calculated cold-hearted democratic bitch vs warm and fuzzy liberal

If I had to take a guess, I'd say that the rumors flying out of the White House about more possible staff changes has to do with the Republican Party's dissatisfaction with Bolten being named Chief of Staff: G.W.B. didn't go far enough outside...it was all just for show...blah, blah blah...I'll be surprised if McClellan is replaced as press secretary given the history between he and G.W.B. Plus, I really, really dislike Dan Bartlett for no good reason other than that he irritates me when he's the talking head on Sunday mornings. He's got this fake jolly thing going on that always comes off as smug and condescending. Slate has got a nice Slated-Out article on Bolten shaking things up.

It's been really fun watching the Republican Party come apart at the seams. They're all acting like a bunch of Democrats with their lack of cohesive message and fighting amongst themselves. I say go ahead Bill Frist and force a vote on immigration this week. That should prove to be entertaining and completely pointless. Unfortunately I fear most of us have been sitting back and enjoying the show as opposed to exploiting this moment of weakness for our political gain.
It's nice to think that we can just stick to issues and push an agenda (though that would require us to get our act together and start being proactive as opposed to scrambling on defense), but the reality is that it's time to start playing the game.

And because I'm duplicitous by nature, it came to my attention this weekend after a spirited discussion that the hot-button issues frequently trotted out to remind us just how far apart we all are deal with such small minorities of people. Take the death penalty, for example (and check out that amazing wikipedia entry on the capital punishment debate!). The amount of people actually affected by death penalty cases in this country are minute compared to the amount of people affected by nonviolent drug offenders being imprisoned. This little gem is going to take a little while and a lot of research to sort out in my brain, but it struck me the other night that we always end up focusing on the issues that divide us. And given the state of the 2 major parties, maybe it's time to start looking for some common ground.

Can you believe I just wrote that?