It's nothing short of serendipitous that Obamacare co-author Jon Gruber crawled out of hiding just long enough to genuflect before Congress the same day the Dems on the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released its five-year long report on the CIA and American torture. I'm sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques." But more on that later…
Both provided painful exercises in this country's moral decay, spreading political corruption and blinding hypocrisy.
Gruber's four hours of often cringe-inducing questions, non-answers and name-calling began, of course, in the most juvenile way possible, with lawmakers enforcing a seating chart. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., forced Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner to sit next to Gruber, thumbing his nose at an administration request to separate the two health care policy malcontents.
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"We believe this is a perfect pairing, a pairing of individuals who are responsible for what we know and don't know…" Issa declared at the start of the tribunal.
Gruber quickly launched into his prepared apology.
"I would like to begin by apologizing sincerely for the offending comments that I made," he told the quote-hungry committee as sharks with cameras circled nearby. "In some cases I made uninformed and glib comments about the political process behind health care reform. I am not an expert on politics and my tone implied that I was, which is wrong. In other cases I simply made insulting and mean comments that are totally uncalled for in any situation. I sincerely apologize both for conjecturing with a tone of expertise and for doing so in such a disparaging fashion. It is never appropriate to try to make oneself seem more important or smarter by demeaning others. I know better. I knew better. I am embarrassed, and I am sorry."
Smart people do dumb stuff all the time, but Gruber sets a new standard for political self-immolation. But I think Republicans would have done well to split up their two sacrifices. Forcing Tavenner to share the stage (so to speak) with Gruber and some other unknown PPACA supporter took some of the heat off of her – and by extension – the administration. It allowed her to basically write off the inflated enrollment numbers – stacked with dental enrollees – as little more than a clerical error. She got off easy.
Of course, Republicans attacked Gruber for his lack of financial disclosure. How much did he make? And when did he make it? I guess it would have been OK if Gruber had been running for president instead.
But the real news of the day came in the hundreds of pages of unclassified documents detailing American torture of "enemy noncombatants" during the Bush administration.
Republicans were outraged. Not at what was done, but what risk it posed to people in the field today, in the form of outraged retribution. But they already hate us? What difference does it make?
While the president feigned moral outrage, lamenting the torture as something un-American and simply "not who we are." But I disagree. Torture is as American as Southern-fried obesity, handguns in every house and cars bigger than the lanes they drive in (I mean, they have to accommodate the expanding drivers, right?).
We should embrace it. But we should do so with the same transparency Republicans demanded on Capitol Hill this week and that this administration has evaded for years. Why not tell terrorists abroad and criminals here at home that if you attack us, we will torture you? Until they can't breathe.
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