The Moral Majority

It is one of the conveniences of being a Republican that whatever you do is by definition considered moral. After all, everyone knows that the Republican party is the moral majority, so this makes living life as a Republican pretty sweet. You can do whatever you want, and that's just ok. If Tom DeLay wants to jet all over the world on all-expense paid trips by lobbyists, that is a moral thing to do. If Rush Limbaugh wants to snort OxyContin to deal with the excruciating pain of his third divorce, that too is very moral. Sometimes moral people have to do what might seem like immoral things, like revealing the identity of CIA agents to punish political enemies, as Karl Rove has recently done. But in the big picture, that's really moral. So is consorting with Islamist terrorists, as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has been known to do on occasion. For that matter, if the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, one of the more moral things you can do for your country is to torture and sexually abuse prisoners of war in Iraq and elsewhere. And of course, as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has stated, the most moral action of all is to invade another country under false pretenses, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths. That is just the kind of thing that a highly moral person - if they're a Republican! - is likely to do. So, there is a fair amount of lee-way in what can be considered moral when it is the Grand Old Party doing the talking. The important thing to remember is that Republicans are always moral because it is the Republicans who get to say what morality is. And that right comes to them from their close personal relationship with God. As the President recently said, God told him to strike back at al-Qaeda, and so he did, and God told him to invade Iraq, so he did. That's getting it straight from the horse's mouth, that is. That's where morality comes from, when you're a Republican.