What does “partisan” mean?

I’m getting sick of the rampant misuse of the word “partisan,” recently most prominently by Republicans attacking any contrary position a Democrat takes – accusing the other side of partisanship is sometimes the last refuge of the scoundrel who has no other argument to make -- but also by media people with their critical faculties turned off.

Partisan does not mean pursuing strong beliefs that historically have not necessarily been associated with one party over the other -- like staying out of stupid foreign wars that are inherently unwinnable, or getting out of such a war after it has been started anyway, or placing a high value on cooperation with the international community, or preserving the Constitutional right of habeas corpus and the Constitutional prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, or rejecting outlandish theories of executive branch power that effectively are outside the system of checks-and-balances that we are all taught in our American history classes, or preserving a Social Security program that is extremely popular with the American people, or having a Federal agency that is actually ready to help in the case of natural disasters. These are beliefs thoroughly in the mainstream of the values of the American people.

There is nothing partisan whatsoever in bona fide concern about politicization of the U.S. Attorneys nationwide. There have long been, in fact, strongly bipartisan ground rules to prevent exactly that. Karl Rove with his minions, including cabinet officer Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a legion of incompetents posing as real attorneys but with the primary goal of serving the wishes of Rove, have tried to change that by getting rid of U.S. Attorneys who were actually honest rather than blatantly pro-Republican in their choice of cases to pursue. This is no he-said, she-said situation. The Democrats in Congress are pursuing a bipartisan agenda. So are people like Specter (finally) in this case. The Administration is pursuing a partisan agenda. So is anyone who provides the slightest bit of support for it, because there is no good faith argument that can be made for it. There are no ifs, ands or buts about this.