Musings: Filibuster vs. "nuclear option"

Government is supposed to be about providing services to the people: city sanitation, national defense and so on. Those who assist in planning and providing these services -- whether they legislate or not -- are known as "public servants." (Remember "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"?) However, the term becomes post-modern or ironic in today's milieu, where political power plays are calqued, or overlaid with transforming effect, on top of a landscape where the people's needs are supposed to come first. Instead of "power to the people," what's called "for the good of the party" becomes the business of politicians -- and every day in this conservative age, they become more and more polarized, so that centrists like John McCain are criticized for actually trying to negotiate a middle path that will preserve our political traditions while getting the government's work done. The moral of the story: Becoming polarized or extremist in one's views is almost always reactionary and dysfunctional -- in the same way that Americans consider Osama Bin Laden to be toxic to innocent souls as well as to the rest of the Muslim faith. The trouble is, to an extremist, his views are never extreme, but normal.