Unity08 was always a professional PR and marketing effort vs. the grass roots political movement they pretended to be. The hot air expelled and greenhouse gas burned in the short life of Unity08 probably raised the temperature of the globe by a full de…

worth repeating. No way would I vote for him now either.CROOKS

I don’t in fact believe Democrats are immune to error and folly, so it’s too much to say I think they were “delivered to the earth on the right hand of God.” Let’s just say that most of them, most of the time, strive to be on the side of the angels.

I have carefully considering your thesis that Republicans are the spawn of satan and that Democrats were delivered to the earth on the right hand of God.

My assessment?

What crap.

You’ve truly captured the essence of this charade that no doubt sucked in more than a few sincere and well-intentioned people.

There is no inherent virtue in bipartisanship, especially when it’s undertaken for its own sake as much as anything else. It is an artificiality that cannot and will not last, if it ever gets off the ground in the first place.

There are logical, practical and enduring reasons why we have two major and several minor parties in this country.

The bigs reasons are well known.

We’ve got a bunch of greed-driven and power-hungry folks who want total control and maximized profits via the best government their money can buy. They’ve never met a war they didn’t like — and find lucrative — and they can scarcely wait to send other people’s young off to fight for mom, apple pie and all the no-bid contracts they can shove their big-money backers’ way. They don’t like welfare or any kind of government assistance for individual Americans, no matter how needy or deserving. Corporate welfare and bailouts are another matter, though.

It’s been said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They’re all for as much of both as they can acquire, along all the money they can get hold of, and they’ll do anything to win so they can keep on getting their fill of both.

These folks will have a political party, the Republican Party, to advance their interests and extend their power and control, no matter what.

Obviously, from the above description, it’s equally inevitable that a whole lot of folks who are not greed driven, wealthy and well connected will have a political party that seeks to keep the aforementioned party within some bounds while seeing to their own needs and advancing their own interests when given a chance. I’m talking about the Democratic Party.

No, the above descriptions don’t apply perfectly to all Republicans and Democrats. Ninety-nine percent is close enough.

As you seem to have caught on to, the Unity thing was designed as a shoehorn to help ease Bloomberg into the presidential race and the White House. Were he to do that, his campaign would become a de-facto party, adding dramatically to the partisan environment.

From the beginning Unity08 was a Bloomberg stalking horse, funded and staffed by Bloomberg loyalists. They couldn’t pull off the Bloomberg run within that structure, so they closed up shop to make room for the coming Bloomberg candidacy and transfered the management and money to the real campaign. The Unity08 Tombstone is enlightening:

“And, of course, waiting in the wings should the divide persist, is the potential of a serious non-partisan candidacy in the person of the Mayor of New York (and indeed we have lost two of our leaders, Doug Bailey and Jerry Rafshoon, to a committee :forming to draft Mayor Bloomberg should the circumstances seem right)… But we’re not closing our doors. We believe it is important to see our case against the FEC through (both for Unity08 and any similar movement in the future) and be ready to gear up if (when) we win our case and political circumstances warrant later this spring. Unity is in the air right now, and Mayor Bloomberg seems poised to run on his own (and the fact is that two independent candidacies wouldn’t work) if the parties leave the sensible center open – but all this could change in a matter of weeks.”

What crap. The worst part is that I actually liked the idea of a Bloomberg candidacy, but the whole thing smells so manipulative and contrived and betrays such contempt for the Unity08 supporters that I can’t stand the thought of supporting him now.