There are still issues that are unrelated to the actions of men dressed in red who chose the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
One of those issues is the state of partisanship within the government of the sole world superpower, the United States.
In the not-so-distant past, members of the United States Congress would see beyond their differences to a larger responsibility towards the nation as a whole, not towards one particular constituency, understanding that the United States was and is a nation of many people with many views, and one view cannot dominate to the exclusion of all others.
Currently, however, those who have been elected to lead in Congress have forgotten that principle, and instead seem to think that complete and total destruction of any who think differently is the only acceptable option to appease their constituency.
Or, as I put it in a post at Random Fate:
The old aphorism, “Is this any way to run a railroad?” seems to apply here.
BOTH parties, BOTH wings, have reverted to zero-sum tactics in a non-zero-sum game.
We are all trapped in a Prisoner’s Dilemma with fools playing a zero-sum game.
As I have said repeatedly, we ALL have to live together, or balkanize and become as weak as the nation-states in that tragic region.
Do we really want to continue down the path of mutual destruction?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.