Is Obama a President or King?

[Heywood]

Your claim is that the republicans won't pass anything the democrats embrace because they hate the democrats....correct? I don't accept this claim but it is certainly a lot more plausible than DP's claim that the republicans won't govern just because Obama is black.

Not exactly. My claim is that the republicans are power mad and have no genuine concern or patriotism for the country. They simply want to be in control and will do absolutely anything to get it. If they 'hate democrats' it is only because they are an obstacle to their power mad aspirations.

We effectively have a two party system. Suppose we could accurately quantify cooperation between the two parties. 100 would mean the two parties agree and cooperate on everything. 0 would mean they agree on nothing and don't cooperate at all. Let X represent the amount of cooperation at any given moment.

Now we should expect X to move up or down over time. It is silly to think that X is a constant. We should expect that occasionally X will move closer to 0 and at other times it will move closer to 100. There will also be occasional outlying situations where X is at extremes....kinda like a 100 year flood.

Politically...I think we are in one of those 100 year flood situations. X has moved much more closer to 0. Because of happenstance, it is simply inevitable that occasionally X will be close to 0. I don't blame either party for what we observe today but rather just chalk it up to this is how the world works.