Meat Marketing

Having lost on gay marriage and the flag, the right wing is on the hunt for some more red meat it can toss at its slavering constituents.

House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.

The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation.

The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative.

Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times’s congressional press credentials.

The White House is also specifically targeting the Times because, as Tony Snow told E&P, they had it first. Yeah, right. The Wall Street Journal gets a free pass because they published a completely independently-researched article with the same detail and depth as the Times because they posted it a couple of hours later? I don't think so. Could it have something to do with the fact that the WSJ is the editorial darling of the Bush White House while the Times is the paper they love to attack because it's the bastion of the liberal elitist MSM. Yeah, that's it. That ought to keep the Freepers happy.

I can't believe we're paying these people in excess of $160,000 a year to pull off this shit. We've got crumbling schools, melting ice caps, gas at $3 a gallon, the Gulf Coast still cleaning up after Katrina, no plan for Iraq, the Taliban on the rise again in Afghanistan, port security actually worse than it was on 9/11, and the best the Congress can come up with in their three-day work week is gay bashing, idol worship, and an exercise in kill-the-messenger. Sheesh.

On the other hand, given their propensity for coming up with truly monumental wastes of money and rubber-stamping their way into irrelevancy at the hands of the Bush administration, perhaps the best we can hope for is that Congress just spends their time not doing any more harm than they've already done.