The crime of candor

Not much disrupts the important work of congress. You can have a paper trail of soliciting sex with a page. You can admit that you have a same-sex partner living with you and working for the government and making a mess of subsidized mortgages.

You can even run away from an accident with a dead woman in the back of your car.

Kickbacks, adultery, drug use, soliciting in the men's room at an airport...and you go back to your seat in congress.

But there is one crime that will get you into deep trouble; the crime of candor.

It is bad form to tell the world that a fellow politician is telling a lie. For sure Joe Wilson will be hauled before his colleagues for shouting out, "You lie!" when the president told one Wednesday night.

And a lie it was. Note that by Friday afternoon (Hmmm. More bad news released on the weekend.) both the senate and the house announced that they were working on language designed to tighten up loopholes in the language of the health care reform bills to prevent giving benefits to illegal aliens.

Note that there is a paper trail on this one as well. The Republicans have submitted amendments to restrict access by illegal aliens but they were flatly rejected along party lines.

And lest we forget, on August 25th the Congressional Research Service sent a report to every senator and congressman, and the White House, telling them about the flaws in HB 3200.

So, Joe Wilson will be taken out behind the woodshed but the president and his co-conspirators who relentlessly told us that health care reform wouldn't benefit illegal aliens are free to go.

Ergo, truth-telling in Washington is a sin, but lying is not. That doesn't say much for our leaders, does it?

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the Glarer of the House, is in photos on Friday announcing that they are looking at ways to correct the flaws. Nice.
Here she is glaring at Joe Wilson. That pose lasted waaaay too long and got more intense by the moment.