Pajamas Media has posted rambling reflections by Fred Thompson. Senator Thompson picks an inopportune moment to speak up for bipartisanship, but his post otherwise displays good judgment. Thompson cites Thomas Sowell -- the man most deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- in support of his reflections:

I talked about this a bit a couple of weeks ago out in California. I talked about how I’d recently run across an old clipping of a Thomas Sowell editorial. In it, he pointed out that Wendell Willkie received the largest vote of any Republican for President when he lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. After the election, though, he never let partisanship turn him into an enemy of the administration. Instead of trashing the president, he served as Roosevelt’s emissary to Winston Churchill.

In the same editorial, Sowell also told a story about Churchill. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain died, early in the Second World War, Churchill delivered his eulogy. Though Chamberlain had turned a deaf ear, for years, to all of Churchill’s warnings that could have prevented that war, Churchill praised him. “He acted with perfect sincerity,” Churchill said. “However the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor when we have done our best.”

Compare that magnanimity to what is going on in Washington and much of the Internet today. Sowell asks us, “In this day and time, can’t we have a responsible adult discussion of issues while the nation’s fate hangs in the balance in its most dangerous hour?”

Neither of Sowell's examples support "bipartisanship" as it is understood or practiced today. (Sowell's column is itself a critique of today's Democrats.) Wilkie opposed the New Deal, but he supported Roosevelt's foreign policy after the election of 1940. Churchill and Chamberlain were both Tories. "Magnanimity" -- the quality Senator Thompson imputes to Churchill's tribute to Chamberlain -- captures the applicable quality of Churchill's character perfectly. "Magnanimity" is always in short supply, in Washington and elsewhere, and should not be confused with "bipartisanship." Bipartisanship can be, and frequently is, a cover for calculation and cowardice -- political expressions of the human qualities known as ambition and pusillanimity.