Anne-Marie Slaughter is the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. It’s a revered institution even if the ever-silly Princeton Marching Band occasionally jumps in their fountain and plays ‘Louie Louie’. Ms. Slaughter is very concerned about the lack of bipartisanship in our foreign policy.
A funny thing is happening in American politics: The fiercest battle is no longer between the left and the right but between partisanship and bipartisanship. The Bush administration, which has been notorious for playing to its hard-right base, has started reaching across the aisle…
With a start like that, what hope can we hold out for the rest of the column? But Slaughter has attempted to inoculate herself from my criticism.
From the left, many progressives have responded to the foreign policy failures of the Bush administration by trying to purge their fellow liberals…
In the blogosphere, pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport…
Left-liberal blog attacks on moderate liberals have reached the point where “mainstream media” bloggers such as Joe Klein at Time magazine are wading in to call for a truce, only to get lambasted themselves.
So, how can I respond to Ms. Slaughter without contributing to the problem she has diagnosed? The short answer is that I cannot. But given her solution (emphasis mine), I feel justified in having my say.
It’s time, then, for a bipartisan backlash. Politicians who think we need bargaining to fix the crises we face should appear side by side with a friend from the other party — the consistent policy of the admirably bipartisan co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton. Candidates who accept that the winner of the 2008 election is going to need a lot of friends across the aisle — not least to get out of Iraq — should make a point of finding something to praise in the other party’s platform. And as for the rest of us, the consumers of a steady diet of political vitriol, every time we read a partisan attack, we should shoot — or at least spam — the messenger.
First, let me point to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial that, as far as I can tell, contained zero factually accurate sentences. The piece completely mischaracterizes the issues and the law involved in the NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program before concluding:
The President should announce immediately that he is rescinding his concession to put these foreign wiretaps under the FISA court. He should say he is doing so as an urgent matter of national security as Commander in Chief because Congress has refused to respond in good faith by modernizing the law to let the U.S. eavesdrop on terrorists who wish us deadly harm. Then let Democrats explain why they’re willing to put partisanship above the safety of America.
How is the blogosphere to respond to such outrages against the public discourse, if not with vitriol?
And where am I to find the moderate Republican that will stand ‘side by side’ with me and denounce this rhetoric? Let me say, for the record, that I will gratefully embrace any Republican that is willing to stand up and admit that the president broke the FISA law, mischaracterized the TSP as solely dealing with terrorists abroad calling into the United States, sent out his Attorney General to lie to Congress about it, and is currently engaged in disinformation campaign including, but not limited to, this Wall Street Journal piece and a conference call of right-wing bloggers.
