"Republicans, wounded and eager to show they have not been stripped of all power, are far more likely to unify against the Democrats who humiliated them in such dramatic fashion."

In the NYT, Jonathan Weisman assesses post-filibuster politics, under the headline "Partisan Fever in Senate Likely to Rise."

Republican senators who were willing to team with Democrats on legislation like an immigration overhaul, farm policy and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act will probably think twice in the future....

Please, Republicans, please be obstructionist. I hear the secret thoughts of the NYT. Go big-time obstructionistic on things that will leverage Democrats next year to say that you hate the Hispanic people and you're at war against women. 

It's the Democrats who are beaten up right now, who need a boost in the midst of the Obamacare debacle. But the NYT is here to tell you that yesterday Democrats "humiliated" Republicans in "such dramatic fashion." The Democrats are desperate to change the subject back to how terrible Republicans are, and the NYT is here to help. The Democrats go "nuclear" on the old Senate tradition, and the NYT stresses the dramatic humiliation of the Republicans.

David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said retaliation by Republicans against the president’s broader agenda would end up hurting them more than Democrats. 

Well, of course, it's his assignment to say why whatever happens is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. You can try to make up the argument for yourself before reading it.

“If their answer is, ‘Oh yeah, we can make it even worse,’ I think they do that at great risk,” Mr. Axelrod said. “They have to make a decision about whether they want to be a shrinking, shrieking, blocking party, or if they are going to be a national party.”

Did you guess right? A good strategy for guessing right would have been to look at what the NYT had in the paragraphs at the top of the article and presume they'd already used the talking point Axelrod had fed them.

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, the president who proclaimed that there was no red America and blue America, only the United States of America, has strained to maintain some pretense of bipartisanship — through protracted and fruitless efforts to woo Republicans on his economic stimulus plan and health care law....

What?! The health-care law is a monument to throwing out bipartisanship. Everyone plays the bipartisanship game until they decide not to. It means nothing that any politician ever "strained to maintain some pretense of bipartisanship." All that matters is: When did they give up the pretense? We saw the Democrats jam Obamacare through without a single Republican vote, and now they've got 100% responsibility for the biggest, craziest government overreach in American history. And they've muscled Republicans even further to the sidelines, because they want what they want. How on earth can this be an occasion for dinging Republicans for a failure of bipartisanship? Ludicrous!

Then on Thursday, before a solemn, almost funereal gathering on the Senate floor, the pretense came to an end....

Mr. Obama expressed hope that a bipartisan spirit “will have a little more space now.” 

On this "funereal" occasion, bipartisanship was in the casket, so I'm going to read Obama's remark as a creepy quip. What a commodious coffin!