How long before we start seeing notes on business doors:
am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours

Including, of course, Bush's response to a question about appointing conservative judges after the 2000 election, an election in which he LOST the popular vote. He said, of course, that he had a mandate to do exactly that. And he did.

Your last graf has some weird sentence construction, so I'm not entirely sure what you mean. I'm going to assume you're suggesting that if the voters don't get what they think Obama and the Dems promised them, they will turn on the party in 2010. This is certainly possible. My point, made a couple times now, is that the GOP doing everything they can — they can't help it, of course, it's their nature — to play the Spitting Anger card at each and every opportunity. And this, in the face of Obama's thoughtful outreach — which may in fact be a sham, but that's not important, as long as it looks like one.

It's weird. Obama has the ability to drive his opponents nuts. They rant and rail about his failures and all the things he isn't, and Obama just keeps on rolling, brushing off the little things as he goes. Until he gets pretty much what he wants. Just ask Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

And you're either being willfully naive or straining to make a rhetorical point when you suggest the Republicans would have voted for the package if only Obama had been a little more like, I dunno, a Republican. That was never going to happen. The GOP is as entrenched an opposition as is humanly possible, and this is only the first in the series of battles that will pivot on that unfortunate, and I think obvious, fact. (And in large part, btw, because the only Republicans who consistently get re-elected are the most conservative members from the most conservative districts. They actually think the entire country is as crazy as they are. At least until the next presidential election.)

(And by the way, pointing out that Bush enjoyed more bipartisan support only serves to make the point that the Dems are either more cowardly or more reasonable or both.)

Republican governors, our own Crist included, supported the bill because a substantial amount of the pork is going to bail them out. Aid to states may be worthy or it may not, but it isn't stimulus and it isn't infrastructure.

I'm not going to respond to your non-responsive revisionism of Bush's supposed partisanship. Up to and INCLUDING the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush did what he did with the support of members of both parties. And the last person to utter the words that he won and would do as he pleased (before Barack Obama, that is) was Bill Clinton. Alas, it is perhaps to my disadvantage in this particular debate that I am unable to remember things that did not happen.

When partisanship did emerge, and party line votes became the norm, it was always the case that democrats did not propose alternatives, they just opposed for the sake of opposition, which is in sharp contrast to what Republicans did with this bill. In many cases, democrats loudly demanded specific things, such as the bulk of Bush's energy package in 2001, and then voted against it right down party lines, for no other reason that to deny Bush the credit for it. We can argue all day about whether, given a clean (or at least a cleaner) bill this time around Republicans actually would have voted for it, like they said they would. But the bottom line is that they were never given the chance. There are probably some instances you can find during Bush's 8 years of similar things, but nothing as important as this. Certainly nothing as large, since there wasn't anything that large during all 8 years.

As for Republican prospects for '10, time will tell, but it's a fact, and the polls bear this out, that a substantial amount of Barack Obama's support, and most especially the support for congressional democrats in both chambers, came from people who were promised something than we thus far are getting from that party. If the people do in fact respond by giving democrats and even greater majority in '10, then I guess we'll be getting what we deserve.

Bottom line is this. The GOP is hooked on tax cuts like hookers on crack. It's the first and only solution they have to offer to any problem, including problems that are not helped in the slightest by them. Given that this is basically the sum total of their contribution to the debate, I'd suggest they're lucky if they got five percent.

And as for 40 percent of Congress? That number is trending downward, and at this rate? It'll be lower still come 2010.

Don't you ever try to take an unbiased look at what's going on? If you look and listen with an open mind, you can plainly see that, according to the left, anyone, including Joe the Plumber, that questions their agenda or doesn't agree with them is racist or not bi-partisan. Obama's whole change mantra has been a lie. Can you not see that, or do you just refuse to see it? A very wise man once said mental health depends on a dedication to reality. Choose reality, John. Don't remain stuck in poor mental health.

Bottom line is that republicans, who hold roughly 40% of congress and took around 47% of the presidential vote, would have voted wholeheartedly for a bill that contained even 30% republican-supported stimulus, 60% democratic-supported stimulus, with a generous 10% portion of bacon thrown in. What they were offered, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, was something resembling 5% republican stimulus, maybe 20% democratic stimulus, and 75% pure unadulterated earmarked pork.

Supposed George W. Bush had governed in this manner? Keep in mind the environment in which he assumed office — he had just barely won an election that his opponents openly tried to steal; and then walked into a WH that had been vandalized by the outgoing frat-boy staff, in response to which he said we should move forward and cleaned up the mess without preserving any evidence, only to be accused (once the evidence was gone) by the guilty parties of having actually made the whole thing up. Yet his first legislative priorities were NCLB, and a RX drug benefit in Medicare. While neither of these was perfect in the eyes of the opposition, both of them were pretty darn close to the center, based on the fact that both sides walked away sorely disappointed in him.

It didn't take very long for Obama to seize the mantle of the most partisan president in history.

Btw.. let's also put an end to the "myth" of Republican control for 8 years, shall we?
2001 January – 2001 June = Republican controlled congress (.5 years)
2001 June – 2003 January = Democratic controlled congress (1.5 years)
2003 January – 2006 January = Republican controlled congress (3 years)
2006 January – current Democratic controlled congress (3 years)

Yes President Bush was in the white house, but Congress controls the purse strings… So it seems to me that you want "bipartisan"-ship, you got it.. and look at the mess it left. President Bush promoted some screwball spending programs, yes… but it seems that he and President Obama are just alike in that regards.