1115.org

The this-is-who-they-really-are gods sent us two telling examples in one day of what Republicanism has become in the time of Bush.

First up, the Republican party’s policy or strategy or set of actionable points when it comes to climate change:

At 11 PM last night, following the eight-hour marathon reading on the Senate floor of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act forced by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) revealed the existence of a GOP strategy memo on the climate debate.

The anonymous memo, provided to Reid “by a lobbyist involved in Republican strategy meetings” and obtained by the subscription-only E&E News, admits that the only goal of the Republican caucus is obstruction and grandstanding:

The goal is for a theme (e.g. climate bill - higher gas prices) each day, and the focus is much more on making political points than in amending the bill, changing the baseline text for any future debate, or affecting policy.

So what if this is arguably one of the most pressing problems of our times? They still don’t care about anything more than scoring political points. Governing the country is just some sort of elaborate video game, where you earn satchels full of lobbyist cash any time you obstruct the Democrats?

And quite apart from the moral corruption that seems to have corroded away every last vestige of the principles they presumably entered public service with, there’s the galloping stupidity evidenced by writing down this kind of stuff and circulating it.

Shifting gears, in addition to the report that “concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence”, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a second report yesterday, which revealed that White House officials withheld intelligence about Iran from most U.S. intelligence agencies:

Pentagon officials concealed from U.S. intelligence agencies potentially useful tips from Iranian agents in 2001 and 2002, including one that Tehran allegedly sent hit teams to Afghanistan to kill Americans, a Senate committee reported Thursday.
[…]
… the report sheds new light on the mistrust and lack of cooperation by Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with the CIA after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

While Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, joined with majority Democrats on the report, the remaining Republicans on the committee issued a dissent. Their main argument: “the report had nothing to do with the original scope of the review — prewar intelligence on Iraq.”

So according to prevailing Republican orthodoxy, when a Senate investigation uncovers wrongdoing that does not fall within the original scope of the investigation, it is just plain wrong to draw attention to that wrongdoing. The proper and fitting response is to ignore it.

For that matter, if you remember the history of the other Senate Intelligence Committee report, the one about prewar intelligence on Iraq, when the committee was presided over by Republican senator Pat Roberts, it believed that when you uncover wrongdoing that does fall within the original scope of the investigation, it is still just plain wrong to draw attention to that wrongdoing.