At long last, have you no sense of shrillness?

James Wolcott, author of Attack Poodles:

Now at this point a certain type of liberal will quote Joseph Welch's famous question to Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Liberals of a certain age love quoting that stirring heroic retort. When Anthony Lewis was a Times columnist, he used to quote it every other week it seemed, and I saw Richard Cohen pull a Joseph Welch a few columns ago.

But I won't. The question is no longer worth raising, even rhetorically. Because we know the answer.

They have no decency. Not a sliver, not a shred. Look at how Max Cleland has been treated, look at how George Soros has been smeared as some sort of Jewish intriguer who oozed his way out of Nazi Germany by Tony Blankley* and a drug kingpin by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, look at--oh, we know what the examples are.

. . . .

Do you really think that Rush and Newt and Dick Cheney and the rest of them regret that they didn't serve in Vietnam, that they didn't do their part for a war they supported and whose cause they still think was just? . . .

They have no conscience, they have no decency, so let's stop fake-pretending that they do.

Nils Bohr, I believe, once said of quantum physics that if you think you comprehend it, you don't understand it. I believe that if you think it's possible to be a decent person and support the current Republican party, you don't understand what you're supporting.