On top of whatever else has been said, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Post op-ed seems to involve an odd definition of “partisan”
The true believers in the Bush revolution are furious. John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, sounded the alarm in February with a broadside against the agreement that the State Department and its Asian negotiating partners had reached with North Korea, warning President Bush that it contradicted “fundamental premises” of his foreign policy. […] Tony Smith published a blistering essay on Iraq in The Washington Post several months ago, attacking not neoconservative policymakers but liberal thinkers who had, he argued, become enablers for the neocons and thus were the real villains. […] In the blogosphere, pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport. […] Obama has come in for his share of abuse as well.
Say what you will about this stuff, but none of it is partisan. Bolton was, after all, perfectly correct to say that the deal Nick Burns struck with North Korea and that Bush agreed to contradicts the basic premises of the Bush foreign policy. The partisan thing for Bolton to have done would have been to keep his qualms quiet and let the Great Leader bask in praise. Similarly, for Democrats to attack Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama isn’t partisanship. What’s partisanship is when people refrain from criticizing their party’s leading figures.