The Republican Lifeboat Factory Never Closes

The Washington Post felt the need to publish this hot slice of Mitch Daniels Both Siderist porn because Washington Post:

When this pandemic is over, let’s avoid the partisan blame game

What follows is not a prediction. More of a precaution, based on a premonition. While I’m wearing out the prefix, let’s call it a preventive prescription.

I’m worried about preventing a sickness, one we’ve been through before — much more recently than the last pandemic flu. It’s our tribal eagerness to employ 20/20 rearview vision and castigate the Other Side for its mistakes, even those made in all sincerity, even those the second-guessers failed to dispute, or even endorsed, at the outset. Since everything these days seems to call for a snappy abbreviation, let’s use HRD, for Hindsight Recrimination Disorder...

Then a burst of wingnut adrenaline surged through Ol' Mitch that must've nearly disintegrated whatever was left of his crispy cinder of a heart.  And in that glorious moment, as if guided from above by the hands of Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld, he decided, WTF, in for a pfennig, in for a pound, so why not lets re-litigate George W. Bush's Iraq Clusterfuck while were about it:

In the first years of this century, the consensus conclusion of multiple national intelligence agencies was that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had or was close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Based on that “expert” information, the United States organized a large number of nations in a massive campaign to eliminate the threat, which proved unjustifiably expensive in both human and economic terms.

To amuse myself, I'm writing in a manner similar to an old party game called "Consequences".   I scroll down.  read a sentence or two, and then write down where I think the song and dance are headed.   At this moment, I've paused to write this and to make a little bet with myself.  I ask myself, "What ginned up Obama-era bullshit will Ol' Mitch now haul out of his superannuated ass and plop into the False Equivalence scales so that he can achieve perfect partisan static equilibrium and then get on with the scolding of the Extremes on Both Sides for their excesses?  Obamacare?  Solyndra?  Tan-Suit-Gate"

Scroll.  Scroll. Scroll.

Well I'll be damned.  Ol' Mitch did none of these.  Instead, incredibly, he just shrugs off the entire Iraq War as a well-intention mistake which was carried out in good faith by honorable men.

Decision-makers of the time could have been criticized for not seeing through faulty data they had been given, without being trashed as liars or scoundrels pursuing personal agendas.

And if I'm reading this a'right, Ol' Mitch would like you to believe that our toxic political atmosphere is primarily the fault of us goddamn Liberals and our goddamn, Iraq Clusterfuck conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy theorists were permitted, even encouraged, to foment the slander that someone fabricated the inaccurate intelligence. Today’s poisonous, partisan atmosphere carries some of the toxins from the ugly Iraq War aftermath.

Wow.

Wowie wow wow wow.

So if we want to avoid redoubling all of of that ugliness, Ol' Mitch admonishes American to follow his lead, clap real hard and pretend that the entire Trump Administration and their enablers in the Congress and in the media simple do no exist at all!  Instead...

Let’s not reprise Iraq. How about we self-vaccinate against HRD and all agree that, whatever comes, people right now are doing their best with the information they have. If their judgments turn out to be mistaken, let’s avoid another orgy of tribal recrimination and agree that we won’t repeat the errors.

Sorry Mitch, your Republican Party has left the civilized with only one way of insuring that the cycle of ruin-denial-and-obstruction your party has repeatedly brought down on our heads is ended once and for all.

And that's by hauling your Republican Party to the ash heap of history and burying it there once and for all.

No Half Measures