Even for Republicans . . .

They have flipped their collective lids. Now they want character references before the US military recovers one of its own who’s been held as a POW. Apparently if enough innuendo is thrown around about the poor schlub the right-wing can be convinced he (or she, I suppose) is unworthy of repatriation to the country of his/her birth. Even better, if it makes good political points against a President, they’ll help spread the rumors themselves.

Moreover, they’ve decided that they need to be consulted on prisoner exchanges and given veto power, because Presidents can’t be trusted to determine the danger those prisoners may represent, even if those guys have been in our custody for as much as 11 years. One could wish that the American long-term unemployed would get rehired as quickly as the Republicans think these five Taliban men will be.

Then there’s this “negotiating with terrorists” complaint. It’s kind of like the drunk looking for his dropped keys in the spot where he lost them, not under the nearest street lamp: you negotiate an end of hostilities with the enemy you’ve been fighting, not their next door neighbors. Who would the Republicans have the President deal with? The Saudis?

Not incidentally, the party has conveniently forgotten that their patron saint President Reagan once approved a deal in which the United States sold arms to the Iranians in an attempt to get hostages set free. The Reagan Administration then turned around and used the cash it got from those arms sales to fund an army of terrorists in Honduras who were trying to overthrow an elected government in Nicaragua. Funding that army, the Contras, was against US law as laid out in three Congressional legislative amendments collectively known as The Boland Amendment. That was negotiating with two different sets of terrorists: the Iranian backers of Hezbollah and the Contras in Central America. It’s funny how that seems to have slipped the minds of right-wing radio and cable talkers as well as members of Congress.

If our media was interested, it could point this stuff out. It just likes conflict because that sells papers and ad airtime, I guess.