The Senate's votes this week on the pending government takeover of health care are highly instructive. With all 60 Democrats voting yes, and all 40 Republicans voting no, the simplistic homily that there is no difference between the parties has now proven to be a very costly fallacy.

This has been a persistent pattern all year. When campaigning for office in 2008, candidate Obama promised the American people a new era of post-partisanship, where he would bring Democrats and Republicans together to solve the nation's problems. There was nothing in Obama's ultraliberal background to suggest he would be remotely capable of this. Sure enough, since his election, this promise of post-partisanship has proven to be boob bait for the gullible.

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