Republicans must be immune from cognitive dissonance. There are plenty of examples, but here’s one that truly needs to be more widely known.
We are told by Rove and his ilk that Democrats would be criminalizing “policy differences” if they so much as think about investigating the Bush era war criminals.
At the same time they threaten to filibuster someone who is on the other side of that policy divide, Obama’s nominee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, who happens to oppose torture. Make no mistake about it, their reasons for opposing her, after you strip away all the bullshit, is that she is anti-torture. So, a person who is anti-torture is fair game for Republican attacks, but actual torturers are off limits.
Speaking of hypocrisy and inability to see ourselves as others see us, someone with time on their hands could have a good time taking apart Arlen Specter’s recently published article in the New York Review of Books entitled The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs. When I read it I was stunned. If I didn’t know better I would have thought, based on this article, that Specter was a fearless opponent of the Bush power grabs, standing up for truth, justice and the American way. He even makes a pitch for keeping the courts open to lawsuits against the phone companies (substituting the government as the defendant) after he enabled that unconstitutional immunity statute in the first place. Specter is in a bind these days. He is tacking to the right to protect himself in the Republican primary, but he badly wants to protect his unearned reputation for moderation and independence. In fact, when push came to shove (or even just to poke) he always caved. The article is full of the self congratulatory use of the personal pronoun. It would be the work of a weekend, at least, to do the googling necessary to demonstrate how mendacious his article is. It is just jam packed with lies, distortions, and special pleading. Unfortunately, this is not a weekend that I can devote to this worthy endeavor. Here’s hoping someone will.
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