At Politco, today, Carrie Budoff Brown has written a featured article, titled "The Big Bipartisan Lie." It begins:



These concessions have already been made! The senate and house plans already included the ability for insurers to sell across state lines, and Obama has already said he's willing to consider tort reform in the context of getting a passable bill.

Both the Senate and House bills included the provision for selling across state lines, despite the fact that Obama specifically argued against in when McCain supported it in one of their debates.

More recently, when Obama addressed the Republicans in Baltimore, he said, "from the start, I sought out and supported ideas from Republicans. I even talked about an issue that has been a holy grail for a lot of you, which was tort reform, and said that I'd be willing to work together as part of a comprehensive package to deal with it. I just didn't get a lot of nibbles."

The Democrats have made *exactly* the concessions that the author of this piece says they haven't. Her analysis is either uninformed or disingenuous.

And of course this doesn't even count the concessions made from the outset, like refusing to fight for a public option.

But that's not all. Besides suggesting that Democrats need to do what they have already done in order to show their bipartisanship, what is her suggestion for what the Republicans should do to show theirs?



That's right. In order to be bipartisan, she suggests, Democrats must change positions, while Republicans merely have to agree to stop lying about the Democrats.

Since when has telling the truth been a concession?