He's had it with these motherf#@*ing politicians with their motherf#@*ing earmark excuses!

Larison is fed up:

The electorate was disgusted [in 2006], but for the most part it was disgusted over other things, including the response, or lack thereof, to the ruin of New Orleans and the disaster that was unfolding in Iraq, and to the extent that the behavior of members of Congress entered into it at all it was the criminal behavior of so many House members resulting in indictments and convictions for corruption. [...]

Henninger is so preoccupied with Jack Murtha’s wheeling and dealing that he seems to have forgotten all about DeLay, Abramoff and the K Street crowd who represented the real criminal and unethical excesses of the GOP majority. Who can take seriously an argument that concludes, “The whole system has become an earmark”? What does that even mean? That is like saying that the federal government has become an amendment.

The funny thing about this complaint is how hollow it is. The GOP could, if it wanted to, make a push anytime it wanted to kill earmarks. The media would no doubt cover it nicely, the GOP could introduce a bill, and it would probably gain broad support, not from the Murthas of the Democratic Party but certainly from good government progressives like Russ Feingold. Earmark reform is the sort of abstruse, wonky issue that Feingold gravitates toward (to be fair, he's been right on the big issues as well, including coming out for gay marriage in 2005, which was slightly before I did). In short, if Republicans were really angry about earmarks, they could take action (or at least attempt to do so) and get it over with, all the while restoring budgetary integrity.

That there has been no effort of which I am aware to do this suggests the cynicism at play within the GOP. You hear the term "earmarks" and their concommittant evils from Republican politicians on a near-daily basis, but they take no action to stop them. Why not? Because they still love them! Really! Of course, the notion that the GOP was voted out of office because of some $30 billion-odd dollars of wasteful earmarks (it is far from clear to me that they are indeed always wasteful) while ignoring the hundreds of billions spent on fighting unnecessary wars and a poorly designed prescription drug entitlement seems to be more than just stupid. It suggests that being a GOP elite requires an individual to believe that 2+2=5.