Since President Obama‘s election, Senate Republicans have demonstrated an almost pathological obstructionism. They have pretty much obstructed anything and everything, including proposals they had themselves proposed or championed or supported in the past.

Now we find that many of them don’t even have the courage of their own obstructionism.

When the weak-and-watery Senate jobs bill came up for a cloture vote, it passed 62-30Ben Nelson voted against the bill; Frank Lautenberg was in New Jersey undergoing chemotherapy.) The final vote was 70-28. Six Republicans who had voted against cloture crawled out of the woodwork, and discovered that the bill they had decided didn’t even deserve to come up for an up-or-down vote actually deserved to be passed into law. Two others who had not voted on the cloture vote — which boils down to voting against cloture, since every “absent” has the same effect as a “nay” — also emerged to vote for the bill.

The gang of six is: Lamar Alexander (TN), Thad Cochran (MS), James Inhofe (OK), George LeMieux (FL), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Roger Wicker (MS). The timid twosome is Orrin Hatch (UT) and Richard Burr (NC).

All eight of these perfect cowards were perfectly willing to kill the jobs bill, but want to be able to deflect any future criticism — on the campaign trail, for example — by saying they voted for it. Only when it didn’t matter any more, of course. But in the he-said-she-said-therefore-it’s-a-draw world of our political discourse, they have positioned themselves to dispute — and, therefore, to dispel — the charge that they opposed the jobs bill.

But maybe I’m being too unkind? Maybe there is some other explanation for the sequence of their votes that doesn’t reek of cowardice and hypocrisy and cynicism?

So let’s sit down, and scratch our heads together, and see if can’t puzzle out some explanation that’s logically consistent, and doesn’t do violence to any of the facts, and doesn’t insult even the meanest intelligence (I don’t know who you’re thinking of here, but I’m thinking Sarah Palin).

I think that we can probably dismiss one this at the outset: “On Tuesday I genuinely believed that the jobs bill was a stinker, but I prayed on it when I went to bed that night, and Wednesday morning I saw it in a whole new light.” It clearly fails the Sarah Palin test.

So if we rule out a genuine change of heart, what else is there?

I’m afraid the only other thing I could come up with (after praying on it when I went to bed, and thinking again in the morning) is this: “See, the cloture vote was on Tuesday. I don’t know what it is, but I can never get my votes right on Tuesdays. Go ahead and look it up. My Tuesday votes never make any damn sense. But Wednesdays? Ah, Wednesdays are a totally different matter. Honest! I promise you!”