Imagine if you will that we had a sitting Democratic president whose staff had served up a covert CIA agent to the world's bad-asses in political payback for her husband's contradiction of official lies. What would the Right Wing be saying today? What would the politicians, the pundits, and the planted press be saying today?
The screaming dried-up shell of Ann Coulter would need an emergency spittle transfusion. Rush Limbaugh would be so disc-slipping hippity-hopping mad that supplies of Oxycontin would have to be air-lifted in by a suddenly responsive FEMA. Sean Hannity would be so indignant that he would rip out and force Colmes' to eat his own still-beating heart on the air just to provide some solace to average Joe's of America who work hard, go to church on Sunday, live right, and expect their government to do the same.
Pat Robertson would be seeing stigmata bleeding in the American flag. The Rove Machine would be churning in engine-smoking hyper-drive to whip up a legion of fund-raising treason barkers. Dick Cheney would be on the Sunday press shows snarling his disgust and calling for swift accountability. Nothing would stop a lynch-mob of Republican led Congressional hearings from extracting the truth for the American people, nor prevent the mob from impeaching the president.
But what are we hearing from Republicans? Rationalizations... Invectives against an overreaching prosecutor... Outraged and unchecked lies denouncing Joe Wilson for telling the truth... Feigning fits of sadness for the selfless civil servant Scooter Libby... Complaints of the case being an annoyance, noise interfering with the focus of the other corrupt items on their agenda... And charges against Democrats' opportunism over mere legal technicalities without a real underlying crime...
The facts of the case are established in the chain of events in the indictments. I'm not going to repeat them. There is something else to address here that is just as vile as the great WHIG-out. It is not just crime and cover-up, it is the Republican response itself, from boss to base. Wence has gone the moral outrage?
It is becoming abundantly clear from reading the editorials, from listening to the pundit pulpits, from scouring the blog hogs, and from eavesdropping on the call-in shows, that Republicans are incapable -- let me put that in all cap's -- Republicans are INCAPABLE of putting the country ahead of their party, their agenda, their ideology. For some, the contents of their ideology is theocracy. For others, it is economic hierarchy. For the Neo-Cons, it is a belief in the necessity of strategic dominance and power structures. Whatever mix of the ideological trilogy to which a Republican subscribes, that ideology seems to be blameless and shameless and right at all costs. It is served ahead of liberty, Constitution, and country. No crime or corruption can touch it. No betrayal of public trust, no betrayal of America's security, no betrayal of citizens in service to the country has any merit against it. Ideology contains a belief in infallibility. The marginalization and rationalization of treason by smiling spinners meets that definition.
There's something about that perpetual smile that is peculiar and implicitly complicit. From Tom Delay to Pat Robertson to Bill Kristol to Karl Rove to Scooter Libby, these guys are full of silly grins. They're painted on like the child who thinks he's getting away with something. The child can't help it even though the not-quite-right grin acts as an intuitive tip to their parent that their child is up to no good.
We know who you are. We know what you're doing. We know what you did. We know that you know. You're not getting away with anything. Wipe that silly grin off your face. You've been busted.