Bumped and Updated: Why Can't We Just All Get Along?

Based on the false premise that the budget debate differences are ones of degree not type, a cottage industry has sprung up to explain why those Republicans won't just do the right thing and cave in.

• Republicans are crazy.  Yes, that must be the reason.  Forget Occam's Razor, the only plausible explanation is that 40 percent of the population must be clinically insane.  Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is a recent proponent of this theory, with his "A Grand Old Cult" piece.  He writes, that Republicans need to be under the care of "a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like."
• The Man behind the curtain  Maybe they are not crazy, but just under the spell of some Svengali, who has them hypnotized into this destructive behavior.  Karl Rove used to fit this bill, with Lee Atwater before him.  Now Grover Norquist is the bogeyman, as Richard Cohen theorized (see above).  Here is the latest column to pick upon the "super-evil-Grover" theme.
• It's the culture.  In this pop psychology take on the subject, the culprit is a defect in our culture which equates compromise with weakness.
• Increasing polarization.  A catchall term that implies that parties are moving farther apart from some mystical Avalon when everyone got together swimmingly.  "Partisan politics", the Tea Party, redistricting, pols no longer drinking together (seriously) are among the usual suspects. 
• Update:  this last point on pols no longer drinking together is put forward in this column in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune.

For a good review of the polarization argument and the yardstick analogy, see this September 2010 column by Peggy Noonan on the Tea Party movement.