Republicans win, even when they lose. That appears to be the conventional wisdom after the Democrats' crucial victory in the Senate health care vote this weekend. In its wake, media outlets gave credence to John McCain's assertion that thanks to President Obama, Washington is "more partisan" and "more bitterly divided than it's been." That followed the pronouncement of CNN's supposedly moderate Republican analyst David Gergen, who proclaimed the party line vote "a tragedy" since it did not garner a "super majority," a result for which "blame is pretty evenly divided."

To be sure, McCain and Gergen are right that bipartisanship is dead. But it is the Republican Party which killed it.

The numbers don't lie. For over a generation, Democrats have acquiesced in the GOP's budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while Republicans instead presented a unified rejectionist front on the economic programs of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Worse still, the Republicans' record-breaking use of the filibuster since being relegated to the minority in 2006 has made the 60 vote threshold a permanent fixture of the Senate. As for Gergen's nostalgia for the political parties that passed Social Security and Medicare with bipartisan majorities, they simply don't exist anymore.

For Republicans, No Means No

The table above tells the tale. (Note that figures are not in real dollars adjusted for inflation.) While some turncoat Democrats helped Reagan and Bush sell their supply-side snake oil, Republicans were determined to torpedo new Democratic presidents:

Consider this year's stimulus bill. Obama's margins in the passage of the final $787 billion conference bill were almost unchanged from the earlier versions produced by the House and Senate. Despite Minority Whip Eric Cantor's earlier claim that Obama's bipartisan outreach was a "very efficient process," the President was shut out again by Republicans in the House. In the Senate, the stimulus actually lost ground, as Ted Kennedy's absence and the no-vote of aborted Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg made the final tally 60-38. So much for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's January statement that the Obama stimulus proposal "could well have broad Republican appeal."

Sadly, President Obama's almost pathological obsession with bipartisan consensus only served to produce more political masochism when it came to this month's health care votes. In the House, exactly one Republican voted for a health care reform bill which passed by a 220-215 margin. Contrary to John McCain's mythology that in the Senate, there had been "no effort that I know of -- of serious across the table negotiations," Obama repeatedly reached out to GOP Senators like Olympia Snowe and left the writing of the Senate health bill to the bipartisan "Gang of Six." For that, President Obama only got what Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) called a "holy war" - and zero Republican votes.

If Barack Obama's experience with Republican obstructionism has been painful, Bill Clinton's was unprecedented. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked:

Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.

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David Gergen and Anderson Cooper actually had the nerve to compare the White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers not appearing before Congress to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignoring Congressional subpoenas. It's bad enough that the press has spent as much time as they have on this overblown story, but to compare the White House not wanting to give Republicans another scalp in the form of Desiree Rogers--who Gergen admits was not the one responsible for the President's safety--to Karl Rove and Harriet Miers refusing to testify in the U.S. Attorney scandal is utterly ridiculous.

If the press had spent half the time they did on the party crashers story asking why Rove and Miers didn't show up to testify, or on the U.S. Attorney scandal at all, maybe the public would be more aware of how Republicans have been stealing elections, how they used the Department of Justice as a political arm of the Republican Party, and how they filled the D.O.J. with partisan hacks like Monica Goodling.

Transcript via CNN.

COOPER: Let's dig deeper with senior political analyst and former presidential adviser David Gergen. David testified before Congress during the Whitewater investigation, when he was a member of President Clinton's staff.

So, the White House is saying, all right, separation of powers, that's why she can't testify. Do you buy that?

DAVID GERGEN: Not really.

COOPER: That is usually used for extremely serious things, not a social secretary.

GERGEN: Yes, not really, Anderson. But let me say a couple of things, preliminarily. I think people ought to get off her back, personally, on a couple of counts. First of all, the one thing this White House has done well is, they have had a ton of people come through that White House, children and various people from poor neighborhoods. And she's been right at the center of that.

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From The Situation Room Oct. 8, 2009. Tony Blankley tries to rationalize the NRCC's sexist statement about Nancy Pelosi saying 'taxpayers can only hope McChrystal is able to put her in her place'. In Tony Blankley's world, the media doesn't pay any attention to Republicans unless they're behaving badly. Really Tony? You're joking right? Because I sure as hell don't see any shortage of Republicans getting face time in the media no matter how they're behaving. The media has had so many 'exclusive' interviews with John McCain since he lost the presidential election I'd almost swear they didn't realize who won. I can't get the man off of my television screen.

And I think Tony needs to take a look at this from the good folks over at Think Progress with a snapshot of the media coverage of Republicans from back in January-- REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Democratic Lawmakers 2 To 1 In Stimulus Debate On Cable News

As Media Matters has documented, during the Bush administration, the media consistently allowed conservatives to dominate their shows, booking them as guests far more often than progressives. The rationale was that Republicans were “in power.”

It appears that old habits die hard. Even though President Obama and his team are in control of the executive branch and Democrats are in the majority in Congress, the cable networks are still turning more often to Republicans and allowing them to set the agenda on major issues, most recently on the debate over the economic recovery package.

On Sunday, conservatives began an all-out assault on President Obama’s economic recovery plan, with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) both announcing that they would vote against the plan as it stood. Despite Obama’s efforts at good faith outreach, congressional conservatives have continued to attack the stimulus plan with a series of false and disingenuous arguments.

The media have been aiding their efforts. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that the five cable news networks — CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business and CNBC — have hosted more Republican lawmakers to discuss the plan than Democrats by a 2 to 1 ratio this week.

Boy Tony, how can the Republicans ever manage to get their message out without making sexist remarks about Nancy Pelosi when the media ignores them like that?

And David Gergen tries to rewrite history pretending that St. Ronnie would never have behaved so badly. Two words David. Southern Strategy.

Transcript below the fold.

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David Gergen apparently thinks that 30% the insurance companies are taking to move our money around is just a "secondary issue" when it comes to what's in the bill making its way through the Senate right now. He then goes on to say it's not real reform and talks about how expensive Romney-care is in Massachusetts. I don't know how anyone could square those two statements. I don't think it's any big mystery why the public option is needed. To keep costs down. I'll refer back to Howard Dean on this one:

Dean: If you're not going to have a public option, then don't call it health reform. Strip all the money out of the bill and just do something we did here in Vermont about fifteen years ago, guaranteed issue and community rating. Require insurance companies to insure everybody. Stop them from kicking people off and don't let them charge huge amounts of money for sicker patients.

That's not health reform. It's insurance reform. You won't do much for the uninsured but you will make the health insurance market work better for the people it does work for. And you know, that's an incremental step and I wouldn't want to throw that out, but I'd strip the money out of the bill because this is going to be and expensive bill and if you're not going to get reform then you shouldn't bother with the expense.

Gergen thinks we should give the money to the insurance companies, and then come back and try to fix it later. Bad idea.

Transcript below the fold.

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As Media Matters has noted, despite CNN's president Jon Klein sending a memo out stating that the network wanted to "avoid booking talk radio hosts" because "[c]omplex issues require world class reporting", they continue to make exceptions for the likes of Tea Bag Party organizer Mark Williams.

Tonight's AC360 was another example of the network giving a hate mongering Tea Bagger with a radio show a format, but they're worried about sullying their image if they might let someone like say, Stephanie Miller back on, who's been pretty vocal about being blacked out from the network on her radio show.

If they wanted to actually give some context to complex issues, they'd allow talk radio show host Thom Hartmann on as a commenter and collectively raise the average IQ of the people who regularly appear on their programming by a few percentage points rather than let this Know Nothing hate monger on there.

Transcript below the fold.

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Rachel Maddow on the Republicans attempt at revisionist history that Ted Kennedy would have been all about compromising to the point of making it a lousy bill just to get something passed on health care reform.

Maddow: In other words if only Ted Kennedy were still here. If only he had a health care bill those Republicans say they would have voted for that. You know, ah, Ted Kennedy did have a health care bill. Senator Kennedy was chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee which approved a health care reform package in July. It's called the Kennedy bill. And Senator Kennedy, helped write that bill. Senators Hatch, and McCain and Gregg, all voted against it. But the revisionist history goes even deeper. They aren't just saying they would have voted for a Kennedy health care bill, even though they had the chance and they didn't.

They're saying they would have voted for a Kennedy health care bill because Ted Kennedy would have compromised with them, because Ted Kennedy was all about making concessions to Republicans.

[.....]

Apparently in the history of Ted Kennedy's life and work as imagined by the GOP today Senator Kennedy was the great compromiser. Ready to water down health care reform in order to bring Republicans on board.

As Rachel notes, Kennedy was anything but that. And to add to Rachel's point, here's a little mash up of some of the "news" coverage from today calling for "Kennedy-like" bipartisanship.

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Later in her show Rachel gave some kudos to friend of the site Bob Cesca for his column at the HuffPo titled, Healthcare Reform Named After Ted Kennedy Must Not Suck. If there's one point to get across with all this yapping about what Senator Kennedy would have or would not have done to reform our health care system, I agree with Rachel that Bob's very simple, yet honest statement hits the nail on the head. Bipartisanship be damned if it means passing a lousy piece of legislation, and do not put Senator Kennedy's name on it if that's what we're going to end up with.

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Paul Begala on AC360 makes the case for why it's time for Democrats to stop negotiating with Republicans on health care reform, and puts out the number on just how much Democrats have given to Republicans in order to appease them for a bill they are never going to get a single vote on. David Gergen is dead wrong here. If there is decent legislation passed with some meaningful reform, the public is not going to care who voted for it.

If it's a bad bill and nothing but a giveaway to the insurance industries, then they're not going to be happy in the end no matter what the roll call is when this is said and done. And Amy Holmes is full of it. Republicans are not going to support even the watered down co-op plan. They're already calling it all the same names they would be single payer if it was on the table, and the public option. Republicans do not want any reform of the insurance industry, or anything to be done which cuts into their profits.

COOPER: Paul, we got a text 360 question based on the -- I guess, the Barney Frank thing.

Patty says, "Do you think the Obama administration is considering moving ahead because of negative Republican reaction at town hall meetings?"

I mean, do you think this -- this idea of -- of going it alone is in response to what they have suddenly seen at all these town hall meetings?

BEGALA: I think, frankly, less the town hall meetings. That hasn't moved a lot of Democrats. I have talked to a whole lot of them. They don't seem terribly rattled by that. But I think what they're seeing is...

COOPER: What about independents?

BEGALA: Well, I mean, Democratic members of Congress.

COOPER: Oh, OK.

COOPER: Among independents, it's -- Republic opposition has hardened. And that's fine. They're the opposition party.

But to try to pass something in a bipartisan fashion is just going to be very difficult, and almost impossible. Look at this. There's four committees that have already passed out versions of health care, three in the House, one in the Senate.

If you add all those committees together, they accepted, the Democrats who run the committees, 183 Republican amendments in those four committees, 183. Despite taking all those 183 amendments, you know how many Republican votes they got? Zero, zilch, as we say in the Catholic Church, bubkes, nada.

Now, at what point do you start to get the idea that the Republicans are just not going to play along? More recently, you know, we have the Senate Finance Committee as the last hope of bipartisanship. Senator Max Baucus, the chairman, is trying to negotiate with Charles Grassley, the leading Republican on the committee.

And he's been reached out to, Grassley has, and the president has praised him in the past. And, so, what does he do? He goes home. And, you know, grandpa Twitter gets on his BlackBerry and says, the president wants to pull the plug on grandma, and then he calls the president of the United States intellectually dishonest.

That's who Obama is trying to deal with. So, there's no hope of bipartisanship.

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From AC360, David Gergen takes Heritage Foundation and Townhall contributor Peter Brookes to task over the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and whether the American government gave anything up in the negotiations to get them back to the United States.

I think it's about time we're talking instead of the aggressive tone we've taken under the Bush administration, where the first reflex is to threaten to drop a bomb on someone's head, or label them part of an "Axis of Evil", and then wonder why they might want weapons of their own.

Of course nothing the Obama administration does is going to satisfy any of the right wingers out there, especially if it involves Bill Clinton to boot. Had this been St. Ronnie making this deal, they'd have been singing his praises to the heavens.

HILL: They are home now.

Digging deeper, though, on the global implications of how they got home, what Tom Foreman was talking about before the break. Of course, this meeting all happened at a time when North Korea hasn't hesitated to test nukes and missiles and on the heels of news that three more Americans are now being held in a country America also does not have a diplomatic relationship with, Iran.

So, does this pump up one dictator and perhaps embolden others?

We're joined now by senior political analyst David Gergen, and Peter Brookes, former Pentagon official in the Bush administration and also currently with the Heritage Foundation.

Gentlemen, good to have both of you with us.

PETER BROOKES, SENIOR FELLOW, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Good evening.

HILL: David, I want to start with you. It -- it's almost impossible to ignore the message many people are saying this sends to North Korea and, for that matter, to other nations, as we just mentioned, who may be on shaky ground with the U.S., that, the next time they have U.S. citizens in their custody, they can use them as bargaining chips for perhaps access to high-level U.S. politicians, essentially rewarding bad behavior.

So, David, how does the U.S. keep that from happening?

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What a surprise. Neocon and former Cheney advisor Mary Matalin thinks that Sarah Palin's announcement that she is resigning as Governor of Alaska is just brilliant...brilliant, I tell you. In her world it's a wonderful thing the Governor is cutting and running away from taking care of her state right now which is in a huge mess, and having some time to play politics for 2012 instead.

On the flip side, David Gergen and Ed Rollins think she's toast. I don't always agree with either of them, but I'd take their slant on how this is going to play out before Matalin's any day of the week.

Matalin's hackery and the video of Rollins and Gergen below the fold.

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Mark Danner on AC360 calls out the Cheney father-daughter tag team for their use of fear mongering and Karl Rove style "ruthless politics of national security". As he notes it isn't good for the country or for the Republican party, not that the Cheney's seem so care.

Mark also points out the very slippery slope that President Obama is talking about taking us down with this idea of prolonged detention which is essentially preventive detention and is not something anyone should be supportive of.

COOPER: Mark, you have written extensively about the detainee issue, about these interrogation techniques. What did you think of what Vice President Cheney said today, about what Liz Cheney said tonight?

DANNER: Well, I think this is an extension of what President Obama has referred to as the politics of fear.

Both Cheneys made very serious charges about President Obama, basically saying, explicitly, that he was endangering the country, that he endangered the country, as -- as Liz Cheney said, by putting out these memos, which is a complete canard.

These techniques have been public not simply since the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, as -- as you pointed out, Anderson, but since 2005, when ABC News did an extensive report that specifically described all these techniques.

So, the idea that this was a great secret and now terrorists can train to them is completely and manifestly untrue. And, as a charge, it is a kind of ruthless politics of national security, of the sort that we have seen Republicans seize on since about four months after 9/11, when Karl Rove basically told the Republican National Committee, look, this is an issue we can win on.

This was January 2002. And you see a kind of reclaiming of this ground, or an attempt to reclaim this ground, from the two Cheneys. And I think the Republican Party in general doesn't want to go in this direction, but they're being, in effect, dragged along, kicking and screaming, by the ubiquitous voice of the former vice president.

I don't think it's good for the country. But I agree with David Gergen that it's at least interesting to see a public debate and to see President Obama come up and, in a prepared speech -- and I thought a very elegant speech -- try to take on these matters and build a consensus for a sustainable policy. And I emphasize sustainable. He wants something that we won't fight about, that can be submitted to the rule of law, that the Supreme Court will not throw out, that can last over the length of the so-called war on terror.

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Boss Limbaugh disses the GOP's listening tour and all but gets dissed himself by the panel on AC360. He thinks the GOP needs a "teaching tour" rather than a listening tour. That's almost as ridiculous as the idea that the GOP is going to listen to anyone to begin with during these town halls. As they note during this discussion, the religious right isn't going away any time soon, so it's obvious none of them think that strangle-hold over the party is going to change. And despite all of David Gergen's happy talk about Jack Kemp, what does he really say about him? He wasn't "grumpy". And even though most of his ideas were about tax cuts, he managed to make the poor and the down and out believe he cared about them. He doesn't actually say that he cared about them at all. Just that he managed to get them to believe he did. I thought Gergen's parsing of words here was rather odd if he does actually believe Kemp cared about the poor.

What Limbaugh fails to realize is that the public has pretty well figured out the GOP for themselves with no need for any "lessons" from Limbaugh or anyone in the GOP, and their actions as well as his are already teaching us all we need to know about them. Anyone that's buying the snake oil they're selling already listens to his radio show, or one of his buddies' radio shows, or they're watching Fox Noise, or reading Michelle Malkin and her ilk, or they are getting their political views from their church where they're fed a healthy dose of right wing propoganda each and every week.

Transcript below the fold.

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From Larry King Live April 28, 2009. While discussing Arlen Specter's defection from the Republican party, David Gergen has to explain to Dana Perino what the term "big tent" means. I love the pinched look he got on his face while she was spouting her nonsense. Hint to Dana...it doesn't mean all moderates. And I hate to break it to you there girly but the idea that there's a chance in hell of your party even becoming slightly more moderate right now looks laughable at best.

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February 18, 2009 CNN

Heather: I guess Michael Steele or Ken Blackwell weren't available for CNN to trot out to defend the NY Post's controversial cartoon so we got to endure Cheney sycophant Ron Christie instead.

"For goodness sakes" Christie just can't figure out why anyone would think the cartoon had racial overtones. David Gergen and Roland Martin call him out for it.

Anderson Cooper 360 covering some of Barack Obama's first formal televised interview since being elected President on al-Arabiya. David Gergen and Reza Aslan weigh in and are impressed to say the least.

From Raw Story:

For his first, formal, televised interview as President of the United States, Barack Obama could have gone anywhere. But instead of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS or any other major American outlet, he's spoken to al-Arabiya, the largest network news provider in the Arab world.

h/t to the HuffPo who has the entire interview transcript available.

MELHEM: Let me take a broader look at the whole region. You are planning to address the Muslim world in your first 100 days from a Muslim capital. And everybody is speculating about the capital. (Laughter.) If you have anything further, that would be great.

How concerned are you -- because, let me tell you, honestly, when I see certain things about America -- in some parts, I don't want to exaggerate -- there is a demonization of America.

THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely.

MELHEM: It's become like a new religion, and like a new religion it has new converts -- like a new religion has its own high priests.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

MELHEM: It's only a religious text.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

MELHEM: And in the last -- since 9/11 and because of Iraq, that alienation is wider between the Americans and -- and in generations past, the United States was held high. It was the only Western power with no colonial legacy.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

MELHEM: How concerned are you and -- because people sense that you have a different political discourse. And I think, judging by (inaudible) and Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and all these, you know -- a chorus --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I noticed this. They seem nervous.

MELHEM: They seem very nervous, exactly. Now, tell me why they should be more nervous?

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