We’ll start with this innocuously titled WaPo piece, “Bush signs child health-care extension into law“. I got all a-titter for a second thinking… did we force Bush into actually passing the S-CHIP program after all? Not exactly… the “extension” just appears to be a continuation of funding through the end of the Bush term or thereabouts, to April 2009, when presumably, Hillary or Barack can do something about it. An “extension” in a temperal sense… but heavens, not any kind of expansion… that might cause our heads to explode with a tax increase.

You see, in these troubling times of extraordinary polarization by a “no-prisoners” Republican Party and conservative movement, what is really and truly needed, sayeth Mr. Broder a/k/a the Dean of Mediocrity from the same pages of WaPo, is… wait for it… bipartisanship (”surrender now, or we’ll run Bloomberg“). I cannot hope in my lifetime to duplicate this kind of tour-de-force of clear-thinking from Digby, basically single-handedly tearing apart the entire concept of bi-partisanship (itself a creation of the most cowardly and vacuous of Village Idiots). In short… everyone, please explain why “what we need to get things done” is some kind of “bipartisanship” when Bush and the Gang (and I do mean “Gang” in the sense of “Gangland”) can get everything they want despite a 30% or worse approval rating. Must be because bipartisanship, for Democrats anyway, is another word for date-rape.

So let’s keep score, shall we… Bush manages to get “credit” for killing the actual expansion of a law that made sure children got adequate health care, and as it becomes clear that Democrats will not only expand their current majorities in both houses of Congress (with which they are accomplishing so much… see above) but win back the White House as well, the usual Washington Village Establishment says “surrender now”. Got it. Let’s move a bit up Interstate 95 and take a look at what the Grey Lady is up to…

Whoa! TBogg sums it up best… (hint: “legacy hire”)… that’s right… the New York Times has hired Bill Kristol to join its staff of op-ed page Village Idiots, a cast that already includes David Brooks.

Is nothing sacred? I mean, I’ve lived well over two-score years now by the simple credo that when someone suggests that you be prosecuted for treason, don’t put them on your own payroll. Of course, that would involve taking anything that Bill Kristol says seriously… and why should we do that?

Oh, these pearls are tightening… I think I’ll need the smelling salts… can’t someone step forward who represents those virile and manly values of standing up for what they believe in? YES. There IS such a man. And (speaking of legacy hires) he is campaigning hard for a restoration of all that he stands for, trying to show that after the better part of a decade since his moment, he is still relevant. Bill Clinton Osama bin Laden has just released another audio-tape (no reference to the Bhutto killing, which you’d think he’d want to take credit for), in which he gives a pep-talk to his supporters in Iowa Iraq and suggests an expansion of activity to New Hampshire the Palestinian territories.

And so the world is back where it belongs: just as it becomes Kristol crystal clear that the conservative movement has disgraced itself so sufficiently that the public will finally and overwhelmingly reject its candidates at the polls, the Democrats have determined once and for all to circle the wagons, and make sure that balanced, rational voices like Bill Kristol’s can scream at us from the pages of the New York Times. Fortunately, we still have that remarkably successful model of centrist triangulating to draw from. And OBL just wants to remind us he’s there. Yup. Got it.

This has been… “bid’ness as usual.”