Open thread for night owls: Grand Bargains are the bane of 'bipartisanship'

Open thread for night owls: Grand Bargains are the bane of 'bipartisanship':

digby writes:

Brad DeLong has a question for Ezra Klein about Grand Bargains:
As a Clinton administration staffer, a question for Ezra. Suppose we do a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal over the next two years. Why don't you think that the next time the Republican Party gets back into power afterwards they won't do what they did the last time they had working majorities everywhere in 2001-3, and indeed the time before that they had working majorities in 1981-2: large tax cuts for the rich that destabilize America's public finances.
It's hard for any veteran of the Clinton Administration to reach any conclusion other than that fixing America's long-run fiscal dilemmas requires first the complete destruction of today's Republican Party, and those of us who care about America's fiscal future need to turn all of our energies to that end. Can you give me reasons not to believe that?
This is a really good question. It's not as if the Democrats haven't done a ton of Grand Bargaining over the past couple of decades—and the result is always that the Republicans demand more. I recall having an argument back in 2000 with a long time Democratic operative who insisted that the Republicans could never demagogue them again because Clinton balanced the budget and left a surplus. Surely the people now understood that the Democrats were fiscally responsible. How'd that work out for us?
Or, for that matter, how did it work out for us on foreign policy and national security and women's rights and affirmative action or anything else? At every turn the GOP has moved further right and the Democrats have felt compelled to scurry after them, all the while insisting that the country would see them as the more "reasonable" and "responsible" for having done so.
The bottom line is that Grand Bargains are a huge part of our problem. [...]

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:

Iraq remains a lethal place for US soldiers and marines; we lost 38 Americans in March.  Last week Muqtada al-Sadr made it clear that any decrease if fighting in Iraq (that's not due to the already completed population transfers in mixed-sectarian parts of the country like Baghdad) remains tenuous and largely out the control of U.S. forces.  US forces were mostly bystanders during the fighting between Shiite factions, but if our soldiers and marines are asked to engage Iraqi forces casualties could quickly go back to the levels we saw in 2006 and early 2007.  [...]
The only big differences between two years ago and today is that a lot more soldiers are on their third deployment to Iraq, the Taliban are even more powerful in Afghanistan, more sergeants and captains have left the military, and more of the men and women we're putting in to that war zone are suffering from the strain and shouldn't be standing in Iraq, with a gun, suffering from anxiety, fatigue and PTSD, hoping they don't get blown up.

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Tweet of the Day:

If anyone sees Newt Gingrich, would you please ask, "Hey, genius, how's the think tank?"

— @LOLGOP via TweetDeck

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