Lancing the boil

An interview with Political scientists Thomas Mann (Brookings Institute and UC Berkeley) and Norman Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute) who came to notice by their analysis that the "broken" politics in the US is a result of the GOP collapse.

They say,

There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not "Washington" or "Congress" or "insiders" or politicians in general.

The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to change its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.

Unless and until the infotainment industry otherwise known as the Mainstream Media stops this false equivalence between GOP and Dems, we will continue to see this.

And really, after the contrast of the free-for-all reality TV of the insult-flinging Republican "debate" and the sober Democratic version, isn't this apparent?