Award winning Time columnist Mark Halperin is back in peak condition and cranking out teh stupid:
The entire Republican caucus, we now know, balked anyway. Time’s Mark Halperin, naturally, is blaming Obama. From this morning’s appearance on MSNBC:
“This is a really bad sign for Barack Obama to try to change Washington…. He needs bipartisan solutions. They went for it and they came up with zero…. [This] does not bode well for a future that is supposed to be post-partisan. […]
“[Obama] could have gone for centrist compromises. You can say to your own party, ‘Sorry, some of you liberals aren’t going to like it, but I am going to change this legislation radically to get a big centrist majority rather than an all-Democratic vote.’ He chose not to do that, that’s the exact path that George Bush took for most of his presidency with disastrous consequences for bipartisanship and solving big problems.”
It’s hard to overstate how foolish this analysis is.
Halperin believes, for reasons that are unclear, that the paramount goal was to win the support of lawmakers who were wrong and who were advocating bad ideas. It’s not about what works, or what would actually improve the economy in the midst of a serious recession. What really matters is “bipartisan solutions.” Why? Because Mark Halperin says so. Merit be damned — if Democrats liked the legislation and Republicans didn’t, it’s necessarily flawed.
For a trip down memory lane, here is Halperin declaring on This Week that when John McCain could not tell reporters how many houses he owned, it was… bad news for Democrats:
It just never stops. And you really have to watch that video to see how truly warped Halperin’s perception of the world is. I am still stunned that he sat there and said that the Obama campaign had “started” the negative attacks by noting that John McCain could not count his houses. Equally silly is the assertion that this was going to cause the Republicans to bring up Ayers and Rezko, because every knows they wouldn’t have brought that up otherwise.
The man is nuts.