The Village has begun its pre-convention bipartisanship nattering. In this episode, Ron Brownstein inanely decries partisan nastiness by talking with Ken Mehlman.

Yes, that Ken Mehlman: former head of the RNC who ran the Bush 2004 campaign, and who now works as a lobbyist and GOP and corporate crony strategist, and is an apparent media darling.

The same Ken Mehlman who helped orchestrate illegal Republican phone-jamming election fraud in NH, assisted with Rove’s illegal "the Math" Powerpoint pre-2006 election presentations, failed to prevent destruction of illicit WH emails routed through the RNC, used the RNC to run patently racist ads, and mucked around on Jack Abramoff’s behalf.

Yeppers, a decency in politics spokesmodel. Nothing like going straight to the source, I suppose:

…The tension between each candidate’s desire to hold the high ground and the extraordinary pressure to go negative—especially as Election Day looms—will be one of the central dynamics in this fall’s campaign. Over the past decade, unconstrained partisanship has debilitated Washington and prevented the federal government from addressing the country’s most pressing problems. This election offers a real possibility—the first in many years—for a de-escalation of the partisan arms race. But this possibility will recede if the presidential campaign turns as toxic as the last two.

From the final years of Bill Clinton’s presidency through Bush’s two bruising terms, American politics has been polarized as sharply as at any point in the past century. Party-line voting in Congress hasn’t been so prevalent since the days of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In the history of modern polling, Republican and Democratic voters have never held such disparate views of a president’s job performance as they do of Bush’s.

“Hyper-partisanship” is how the Republican strategist Ken Mehlman aptly describes the current political environment….

Let’s hear it for Mr. Clean Hands 2008! Brownstein also fails to note that Mehlman is currently advising McCain’s campaign. Golly, I’m certain Mehlman’s comments were meant only the purest bipartisan fashion with no intent for public or "journalistic" manipulation through talking pointery.

Next up: a Karl Rove symposium on ethics and rising above illegal 527 coordination!

Far be it for me to correct the Village Elders, but giving the worst partisan perpetrators an unquestioning forum legitimizes their slime methods by your sin of omissions whitewash. You are being dishonest to your readership when you fail to point out the myriad ethical and legal deficiencies of said "experts."

Remember when Mehlman demanded an apology from anyone saying Rove spoke to journalists about Valerie Plame? Ahhh, good times. Or how about when he and Rove were talking this smack:

"Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?" Mehlman asked.

Because Democrats are all about aiding terrorist sleeper cells — wow, how bipartisan of him. How full of utterly dishonest crap.

Folks like Mehlman, and his political patron Karl Rove, have been the Pied Pipers of Smarmdom for years and should be labeled as such outright. Mehlman and his fellow GOP smarm travellers publicly decry partisanship and offer to shake hands, while wielding a knife in the back like Brutus at the first opportunity. Every single time.

The whole Brownstein article could be a drinking game of truthiness and faux balancing acts, but we’d all be blitzed before the end of the first page. Anyone else feel like the Village bipartisan brigades might just be a Monty Python sketch that got away?

More on the truthiness of bipartisanship from Glenn, Digby, Yglesias, Digby again, Arianna, Eli, and The Nation. Jeebus, some zombies never, ever go away, do they?

(YouTube — Monty Python’s "Twit Of The Year" competition sketch. Seemed apropos.)


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