Politico often seems like one of those push-me pull-you political websites: they do enough straight up reporting occasionally that you tend to forget how consistently they spout the GOP line. And that’s aided the site in its quest for readers of both political stripes.

But over the last six months or so, Politico seems to have decided, like Beck and Palin and Huckabee and those with an eye on internet traffic and free-floating rage dollars, that the GOP line is their lifeline. In Politico’s world, the Senate Republicans are trying like heck to be bipartisan but the darn partisan Dems are determined to rend the comity of the Senate.

And we know what that means. Now that Dems have followed through with their threat on healthcare, the GOP has no real choice but to oppose them on everything else, ever:

“With a united Democratic Caucus, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was able to get to cloture on health care without a single GOP vote. But Democrats aren’t united on climate change, and the bitter battle over health care has left even sympathetic Republicans with little desire to help — a dynamic that would likely doom the bill to legislative failure.

“’It makes it hard to do anything because of the way this was handled,’ said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).”

As though the GOP hadn’t very clearly decided not merely to oppose but to filibuster every single major piece of legislation under Senate consideration, including, most recently, bills to fund the troops.

Gosh darn that Harry Reid. Now we’ve lost that small, mavericky band of “sympathetic” Republicans, like good old John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. Not to mention good old mavericky Joe Lieberman, the three men who would be running the country right now if that darned Barack Obama hadn’t been so mean to Sarah Palin and denied his ties to Bill Ayres and invented a time traveling device to insert a fictitious birth announcement into an unsuspecting Honolulu daily.