Unless my eyes and ears are deceiving me, it appears that congressional Republicans have not been consistent in their responses to deadly terrorism. Permit me to explain.
The 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi killed four Americans. The Republican response:
More than 30 hearings over a 3-year span conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, the House intelligence Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Select Committee on Benghazi. With 11 hours of testimony from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. With committee sleuths perusing more than 25,000 pages of documents.
The 2021 terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, an attack perpetrated by American citizens on their own government, incited by an American president, killed six people (two of them, law enforcement suicides) and injured 140 Capitol police officers. The Republican response:
A Senate trial would be divisive.
A Senate trial would be unconstitutional.
Let’s just heal and move on.
Forget it, we need to unify.
Just let it go, the guy’s not even president anymore.
“I mean, at some point, I mean, give the man a break.” (Thank you, Nikki Haley.)
It’s hard to know exactly what the GOP stands for anymore, beyond its knee-jerk fealty to the insurrectionist in exile. But it’s clear that the cult is well-practiced in the art of situation ethics. The dictionary defines situation ethics as “the doctrine of flexibility in the application of moral laws according to circumstances.” The synonym for that is flaming hypocrisy.
Need I say more?