perfidy

Some say the Democrats in the Senate are ruining the country with their blocking of Bush appointees to the Federal Courts.
Some say they are doing good; keeping far-right troglodyte thinkers off the bench.
Some say that Newt Ging-er-itch started it way back when.
Some say that Daschle's the villain.

Lileks says, "[L]istening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, [I was] wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world’s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up."

No matter what you may think of the first four conditions I list, number five really hits the mark. The Senate has always been a magesterial clownshow, no less now than at any point before. But the current hijinks combined with the fact that ideological rivals no longer even meet socially-- Republicans and Democrats can't even be drinking buddies-- means that the nation's political landscape is more unstable now than it has been since... oh.... 1876 or so.