TRIBAL HYPE.

Here's a thought. Want a clue why the Congress can't seem to get an immigration reform bill out when everybody seems to want one? We've all forgotten how to compromise. See, as Bob Schieffer pointed out eloquently last Sunday morning, everybody wants his way. Therefore, this legislative body has forgotten that they're supposed to compromise. Thus, "Congress demonstrated yet again that it could not muster the political will to confront a major problem head-on and resolve it."

Blame isn't productive, but I'll blame the Shark wing of the Republican Party for honing the art of demonizing opponents to a razor's edge. And the Snark wing of the Democratic Party for playing at their game, poorly. The result: for some time we've had only posturing faux ideologues to choose from for Senate and House. The only thing that's "saved" us this season is our general cross-party agreement to sack the most extreme jerks and get some, any, new blood in there.

We have to do something about this gap in our current education, this slide in our political culture. If you want a searing, eye-burning look at the end result of extreme name-calling and cultural labeling in politics, just look east, at Iraq, Gaza, Rwanda, and back in time to Serbia-Bosnia-et al, Lebanon, Northern Ireland.

The longer we demonize Conservative Tribes, Liberal Tribes, Christian Tribes, and all the rest of the sub-tribes, the more we're apt to tilt our increasingly gory terrain. We're going to have to agree on something; and to do that, we must rediscover that more than one person deserves to be right.