Clueless Leaders

WHAT CAN ONE SAY? House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said this yesterday about Terri Schiavo:

Like other Republican lawmakers championing Schiavo's bill, DeLay often suggests she is alert and potentially treatable.

"She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts," he said Sunday evening. "It won't take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo. It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require."

For those keeping score at home, that statement is a straight-up, non-fungible, unambiguous, and utterly unconscionable lie. And if you were watching cable news yesterday (as I was), it’s probably safe to say you never heard anyone call DeLay out on it, or any number of similarly, knowingly fallacious statements spewing forth from the mouths of our national political leaders.

Is Delay knowingly lying? As loathsome as he may be, I find it hard to believe he is straight up lying. More likely, he has been fed some bad information and then took extra liberties with it. The result is as gross a distortion of fact as you will ever see from someone in Washington. The fact that Bush rushed to DC from vacation to sign legislation specifically geared towards Schiavo suggests he was misled as well. It's hard to believe the GOP would be so stupid as to take these extraordinary measures if they knew Sciavo was essentially a vegetable.

The GOP modus operandi is clear: find an exploitable situation and exaggerate the hell out of it. This is clearly what happened with 9/11, tax cuts, Iraq's WMD and now with Social Security.

What we have here with the GOP is a stunning mixture of arrogance, power, malevolence, stupidity and ignorance.

I have to think that they can only keep this bullshit-laden balloon afloat so long before it comes crashing down and covers everyone with, well, you know what.