Finding the Middle Ground

Here is a nice summary of the American politics. This is from the Fiscal Times:

Just before the mid-term elections, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell candidly told the National Journal, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

If that means doing nothing to help 15 million Americans searching for work who can't find it, too bad. If that means blocking ratification of a nuclear arms control treaty with Russia that's wholeheartedly backed by all the top U.S. military leaders as needed for national security, so be it.

If that means stone-walling efforts to stimulate the economy with business tax cuts, or blocking extension of expiring jobless benefits, that's the way the cookie crumbles. If that means changing the law to direct the Federal Reserve to stop paying attention to unemployment and focus solely on inflation in its monetary policy decisions, we’ll ignore the fact that core inflation is the lowest in half a century.

In short, congressional Republicans don't want conditions in the United States to improve on any front before the 2012 elections. It's also clear they have no intention of cooperating with the president on any of the myriad problems facing the country. This was particularly evident when McConnell and John Boehner, incoming speaker of the newly Republican House of Representatives, said they were too busy to meet with Obama at the White House.

There's more. Go read the whole article.

The above makes it utterly obvious that Obama is obtuse in continuing a policy of "reaching across the aisle" to find compromise. Worse, Obama first compromises his own position, then takes it to the Republicans who of course declare that the position is "extreme" and demand that Obama "compromise" by adopting the Republican position. Nutty.

The depth of intransigence and sabotage by the Republicans is truly monumental. Here is a bit from This Week with Christine Amanapour on ABC television:

AMANPOUR: And, again, as Admiral Mullen said, it's not just a nice treaty with a foreign country. It is about Russia's cooperation on all the issues that the United States needs, whether it's Afghanistan, Iran, and all the rest of it.

Plus, I don't know what you think, but some are saying that this could give rise to the hard-liners in Russia again, who just do not want to -- who just don't want to deal with the United States.

LUCE: Oh, absolutely. I think it's -- it's a dream -- if you picked two countries that would like to see a failure of ratification, it would be North Korea and Iran. And I think that -- if that argument doesn't work with the Republicans, that sort of basic elemental national security argument doesn't work, nothing is. There's -- there's a greater hatred of Obama than there is a love of American national security.

In short, the Republicans are fanatics who are willing to bring down the whole of America in order to get at their "enemy" Obama even if it hurts them and the American people. That is the very essence of fanaticism. It is completely dysfunctional. And this is what a majority of American electors choose a few weeks ago in the mid-term Congressional elections.