I happened to catch some of this morning's monotonously offensive Republican grilling of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius--and I confess my disappointment in her, as well as the administration's response in general to the GOP's hobgoblin quackery.
Sebelius et al should have taken a flame-thrown page from New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell: Are you serious what you just said? Are you really serious? Because, to you and me, obviously the Republicans were not. To many of the less politically junktified, however, their outrage could be mistaken as sincere.
I'm all for civility, but in politics one-way civility can look suspiciously like a canine appendage tucked between weakened legs. Sebelius had already accepted responsibility for all that's gone wrong in Obamacare's breathtakingly inept rollout--in my opinion, she should have taken her accountability to the ultimate point of resignation, but that's a different topic--and a show-trial display of endless self-flagellation is but a proper part of dutiful shame.
But House Republicans weren't content with that. Instead they insisted on hurling aggressive abuse at Sebelius, much of it aggressively ignorant, too--and those were the many instances in which her cool civility should have taken a holiday: Are you serious what you just asked? Are you really serious? For three years we've suffered you burrowing boils on humanity as we've tried to accomplish some actual good in the face of your many cheap, opportunistic dishonesties. And now I find that you still don't understand even the law's most elemental basics. Try educating yourselves before wasting my time; I'm too busy trying to fix what you helped to fuck up.
Or something like that, which isn't even a lack of civility, really. It's just the truth.