It was not liberals who ended the career of Richard Lugar. The longest-serving Republican in the Senate was unceremoniously dumped last week by the Tea Party fringe. He was not, as the saying goes, caught with a dead girl or a live boy. He was just too doggone moderate, too ready to compromise with the Democrats. Thanks for that, Senator Lugar. Oh, and you’re fired.
Today’s Republicans are different. They truly have put partisanship ahead of patriotism, as the political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann document in their book, Even Worse Than it Looks. “The GOP,” they write, “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”…
Sure, the Democrats hated George W. Bush. But when he wanted to meet them halfway on education, even Ted Kennedy helped him. And when he wanted to make an impressive commitment to fighting AIDS, TB, and malaria in Africa, Harry Reid and Joe Biden—along with Richard Lugar—made it happen.
