Gloriosky! Now the administration is supposed to tiptoe around the imagined "goodwill" of congressional Republicans who don't have any?

"What they saw through those yellow-gold lenses, they never forgot. And neither will you, my friends." After all these decades since I last saw this episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller, "The Cheaters," from 1960, I find that the whole darned thing is on YouTube! We learn from Boris K that the old-time Dutch scientist who created the Cheaters and then boldly looked into a mirror "hanged himself before dawn."


"The choice of a successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state has turned into an unexpectedly nasty political fight that could cost the White House valuable goodwill with Republicans."

-- from "Fight over Susan Rice holds political risks for White House," by the Washington Post's Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson

by Ken

The quotation above from Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson's WaPo piece is in fact the story's lead, and it's about as far as I got -- running into that astonishing phrase "valuable goodwill" as applied to congressional Republicans.

"Valuable goodwill"? From these pestilential vermin? I'm tempted to say that there isn't a neuron's worth of goodwill, not to mention honesty or decency, residing anywhere inside the carcases of life forms like Young Johnny McCranky, Lindsey Graham, or Susan Collins, but that probably isn't so. It would probably be more correct that these life forms have mastered the skill of suppressing any impulse to goodwill, honesty, or decency that happens to pop into their consciousness.

The other day when Susasn Rice bearded the lions as it were, sashaying into the den of the right-wing foreign-policy sociopaths, I understood the logic, and even had a certain admiration for it. The vilification they were performing on her, after all, was almost wholly irrational and counterfactual, so why not step right up and try to set the record straight?

Ambassador Rice found out why not, and I'm afraid that came as no surprise whatsoever to me, because she wasn't dealing with people with either functioning ethics or reason. They're savage beasts driven solely by the dark screeching of their deep-seated loathsomeness. And so, instead of clearing the air, their session seems to have breathed even more toxic fumes into the miasma of their America-loathing psychosis and their compulsion to turn the country into a mirror of their fundmental evil.

Now I hold no brief for Rice, but as yet no one has shown any significant offense committed by anyone in the U.S. government in connection with the lethal assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Personally, the thread I would most like to see pursued, is the possible culpability of mentally defective congressional Republicans in denying the State Dept. adequate funds to protect its people around the world. But that won't happen, because Republicans consider that they have carte blanche to commit any form of criminal behavior as long as it's in the service of their murderous ideological psychosis.

So primitive monsters like the McCranky, Graham, and Collins demons should feel free to pursue their witch hunt just as soon as they deal, finally, with the years-long history of indisputable raging monstrous criminality of the foreign-policy of the Bush regime. They will truly have performed a public service when we get to see justice done to everyone involved in those many years' worth of that lethal combination of mass-murderous war crimes and the Great Wall of Lies the conspirators threw up to try to conceal their malefaction from public view. I'm thinking of an assembly line of the murdering hoodlums filing up to a dais, commencement-style, for the administering of their lethal injections. With Chimpy the Then-Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney either leading the way or bringing up the rear -- I'm open to discussion on the point.

At that point it will become appropriate for congresscreeps -- any of them still alive and kicking, that is -- to consider the appropriateness of a slap on the wrist for Ambassador Rice for passing on the intelligence talking points about the Benghazi raid as they were given to her.

A more worthwhile use of the congresscreeps' time, however, would be to pursue the quest of that old Dutch scientist who created the Cheaters. As Boris K explains in the intro to the episode, it's only through the final custodian of those mysterious glasses, which enable the viewer to see the truth, that we learn what they were actually created for. They were created to enable the beholder to look into a mirror and see the truth about himself -- with unanticipatedly fatal consequences.

No doubt there are many Democrats who would benefit from this same exercise. But I'm hard put to think of any Republicans who would survive it. Certainly none of the Senate Republican Psychos.

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