Bipartisanship: The God That Failed

Ephrom Josine
8 min readFeb 3, 2021

--

Winners make policy, losers go home. — Mitch McConnell, 2/21/2017

We keep hearing about how Biden is a Catholic, however, I don’t think that’s the case. And I don’t mean that in the typical religious right way of “if Biden truly believed in God he’d implement my ideal theocracy,” (as I’ve talked about before, Biden has used the language of the theocrat when it helps him) but in a very different way. Biden’s God is the God of The Bible, nor that of any religion most people practice outside of Washington D.C. Biden’s God, to put it simply, is bipartisanship.

On 2/1/2021, Biden met with a group of ten Republican Senators, all of whom had a counter-plan to Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill. Biden’s plan is estimated to cost $1.9 trillion, while the counter-plan is estimated to cost only $600 billion. The details of exactly what’s in the Democratic plan that’s not in the Republican plan are a little hard to find, but it is known things like funding to local governments would not be included.

One of the Senators involved with the new Republican plan, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, has done this same song and dance before. This was the woman who promised that she would vote for Obama’s stimulus plan if he shrunk it from over $1 trillion to under $800 million — where it eventually ended up. Of course, Collins never gave a reason why that number specifically was where the line was — but Obama wanted bipartisanship so he went along despite Democrats having 57 Senate seats (and the seats of two Independents who caused with the Democrats) at that time.

People forget this, but during this first two-years, Obama tried everything possible to compromise with the Republicans, despite being elected primarily as a result of a backlash against George W. Bush after the failed Iraq War and the crash of 2008. Obama campaigned against everything Bush had done, from the War on Terror, to tax cuts, to No Child Left Behind, to literally everything else. However, Obama then basically gave the Republican Party control over the defense department, intelligence agencies, immigration policies, and the legislative branch. (Despite Bush’s wars being easily the most unpopular thing about his administration, Obama still instituted Democratic hawks all throughout his administration and kept Robert Gates as his Secretary of Defense for his first two years.) Even some of his famous accomplishments, the DREAM program and the Individual Mandate, for example, were Republican plans from just a few years earlier.

How did Republicans respond to this? They blasted him as a Nazi — a communist, Kenya born, dictator loving, authoritarian, constitution hating, Muslim, pedophilic, tan suit-wearing Nazi — that’s the worst kind of Nazi! Here is just some of the toxic nonsense that was spewed about Obama from day one:

Hey, does anybody notice this crazy thing that we’re on the road to socialism? I’m just saying. Wow. We got — we got the SCHIPs thing going for us. That’s great. There is the change that we were all hoping for, really, seriously. Hey, I got an idea. If we’re going down the road to socialism, I mean, why not really go for it, huh? Comrades, good news from the western front, our glorious revolution is starting to take hold. Oh, the revolution of change. Our fearless leader has just signed in SCHIPs, and earlier today, he spoke out against capitalism. Listen up. — Glenn Beck, 2/5/2009

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up. — Glenn Beck, 3/9/2009

Finally — well, he wasn’t the president. He was the chancellor, Hitler, decided that it was the only empathetic thing to do, is to put this child down and put him out of his suffering. It was the beginning of the T4, which led to genocide everywhere. It was the beginning of it. Empathy leads you to very bad decisions many times. — Glenn Beck, 5/26/2009

The health care bill is reparations. It’s the beginning of reparations. He’s going to give — if you want to go into medical school, the medical schools will get more federal dollars if they have proven that they are putting minorities ahead. — Glenn Beck, 7/9/2009

…I said yesterday on Fox & Friends, I think the president is a racist, I think he has race issues. Don’t know if he hates white people, but there’s something going on with the president. Well, I stand by that. And I deem him a racist based on really his own standard of racism, the standard of the left. — Glenn Beck, 7/29/2009

If I wanted Obama to succeed, I’d be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he’s talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the US government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work. So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” — Rush Limbaugh, 1/16/2009

So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail, if his agenda is a far-left collectivism, some people say socialism, as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed? — Rush Limbaugh, 1/22/2009

Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, ruled by dictate. — Rush Limbaugh, 9/6/2009

He said somebody else said, ‘This is payback,’ meaning, ‘All right, look. We don’t care if it’s the New Black Panthers or whoever it is. Black people in this country have never, ever had a fair shake. This is payback. O.J. Simpson was payback. How does it feel?’ That word ‘payback’ is not mine, [but] it is exactly how I think Obama looks at the country: It’s payback time… There’s no question that payback is what this administration is all about, presiding over the decline of the United States of America, and doing so happily.” — Rush Limbaugh, 7/2/2010

He’s an Afro-Leninist, and I know he’s dangerous. — Michael Savage, 4/14/2008

President Obama is, however, a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause. He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats. He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict. He sees himself as an embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms — not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually. — Ben Shapiro, 2/3/2010

The Tea Party, Fox News, and talk radio all called him everything except the one thing he truly was — a man who betrayed his own party, and by extension the will of the people, in order to appeal to the almighty God of bipartisanship. (One wonders why Obama couldn’t keep his bizarre religion out of government. Maybe “work with your enemies even if it’s obviously harming you” is an obscure commandment in Islam.) Ironically, during an administration blasted as anti-democratic by its critics, Obama’s most anti-democratic and dictatorial action was giving the Republicans their biggest gift, instead of casting their words to the side like Americans had voted for in 2006 and 2008.

Here, the same idea applies. A historic 81,268,924 voted for Joe Biden, many of them simply wanted to get Trump and the Republicans out of office. 77,545,341 made that intention clear by voting for Pelosi to lead the House, overcoming the massive gerrymandering done by Republicans in the process. While Democrats did not do their best in Senate races, they still managed to run competitive races against Republican bigwigs like Thom Tills and Lindsey Ghramm, all resulting in Schumer becoming the Majority Leader after Georgia elected two Democratic Senators! With Georgia going blue by a wide margin for the first time since 1992 and Arizona doing the same for the first time since 1996 — this was a mandate, plain and simple. Biden’s blind desire for bipartisanship is not a call for “civility” like keeps being claimed — it’s a call for subverting the will of the people.

Might I remind you, a non-insignificant amount of Biden voters think Trump, McConnell, and McCarthy are all fascists — as are much of the Republican Party. They voted for Joe Biden in hopes he’d “save democracy” and “defeat fascism,” — only for Biden to tell us that actually we need to work with fascists. If the left is right and Trump is Hitler, then Joe Biden is Nevile Chamberlain giving Hitler Chekosylonkia in hopes of stopping a war. If Jeff Flake was right (a premise which I do not accept) and Trump is Stalin, then Joe Biden is acting like Vladimir Lenin — after Lenin had died. The people who voted for Biden do not want unity, they want Democrats to run the government. That’s why they promised to vote blue no matter who, and voted blue down the ticket, once again, no matter who it was.

And do I even need to remind my readers what Republicans said about Biden? Before Biden had even entered office, Lauren Boebert had already announced her intent to try and impeach him. It was Republicans in Congress like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, not on obscure Q-Anon blogs, who demanded Jack Dorcey allow them to use his platform to claim Hunter Biden is a child-rapist who got his daddy to fire a corrupt prosecutor because the prosecutor was coming after him. (Both of those statements, I should note, are not in any way correct.) The Republican Party does not want unity, if we learned anything from 1/6/2021, it’s that they want Biden’s head on a stick.

Biden seems to want America to return a more simple time, where yeah politicians argued but at the end of the day, they’d go to Little Saint James together. Joe Biden even bragged in 2017 about his ability to get along with segregationists:

Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.

Being too nice to segregationists is what caused the Civil Rights Act to be filibustered for seventy-five-days-straight. If Joe Biden really wants to go back to that then he should know, while it may be easier for politicians, it is much harder for the people actually suffering — you know, their voters!

Bipartisanship comes back to that old phrase: It takes two to tango. Well, in this case, Joe Biden is trying to get two people who do not want to tango to do such a thing, which is only going make it so the wrong person leads.

--

--

Ephrom Josine

Political Commentator; Follow My Twitter: @EphromJosine1