There’s an interesting discussion going on at Lance Mannion’s blog jumping off from a post about just why it is that Beltway insiders keep calling for unity and compromise when it’s clear to most people that such a thing is impossible. The insiders keep begging despite the fact that compromise between Democrats and Repugs looks to outsiders

like asking the cops to compromise and work together with the Mob. It’s like asking doctors to compromise and work together with a plague. It’s like asking…people living in a democracy to compromise and work together with people who want to overthrow that democracy and replace it with an aristocracy that bows to a dictator.

The discussion contains a lot of themes I’ve been on about for years. First of all is that “united we stand” is an empty slogan—it meant something for a few weeks after 9/11 but it’s patent nonsense today—the last time the United States was as politically polarized as it is today, it took the Civil War to sort it out. Another regards who was terrorized the most by the 9/11 attacks. It’s not those of us on the left, perpetually accused of being appeasers: It’s right-wing ideologues, from administration bigshots to yellow-elephant bloggers who, far from being Fearless Fighters of Insensate Evil, are still wetting their pants like five-year-old girls every time someone in a keffiyeh says “boo”; it’s the media elites who, as residents of New York and/or Washington felt themselves and their families personally attacked on 9/11 and have never forgotten how frightened they were. (This is one premise of Mannion’s original post—that Beltway journalists are being fed off-the-record horror tales about near-miss terror attacks, which spreads the meme that everything Bush has done since 9/11 has “kept us safe.”) And then there’s this, about why the insiders seem blinded to the reality of just what kind of people the most prominent right-wingers really are:

[T]hese people who are in their public/political lives (as seen by outsiders like ourselves) crude, savage, delusional, accomplished liars, and fundamentally un-American, are apparently perfectly mild-mannered, normal-seeming, kid-and-pet-loving types in their personal lives. That’s what confuses the pundits and makes the Beltway mentality so destructive to ethical government: they cannot square the ‘good guys’ [that] they know socially with the results of their political acts, so it’s easier to pretend that the actions are trivial than it is to critique the well-liked individuals.

Which is pretty much what I said a while back about the way John Roberts and Samuel Alito got onto the Supreme Court.

Go read the whole thing.

(The post also includes the Quote of the Day from commenter owlbear1, who talks about right-wing bloggers and their fondness for claiming that only they “get it”—that only they understand the true stakes of the war on terror, or World War IV, or whatever the hell its name is this week. Owlbear1 describes get it as “a particular warblogger term oddly reminiscent of someone who just spent all night on peyote and has now returned to their job at the supermarket.”)