Republicrats Rising

...or sinking, depending upon how one looks at it.

The most diplomatic way I can look at it is that I don't understand what GOP poobahs are thinking these days. I really don't.

Just take a gander at this:

Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee says arrogance by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration has hurt the U.S. handling of the war in Iraq.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Chafee said the Administration has a dismissive attitude and has been unwilling to listen to outsiders.

He calls it "the arrogance factor."

Chafee said he shares the concerns about Rumsfeld's management style raised by a half-dozen retired generals, and urged Bush to meet with them.

"Linc" is reading from Democrat talking points. Period. And while he might escape this faux pas with the excuse that his Republican primary challenger, Steve Laffey, is also obtusely calling for Rummy's ouster, it is far from his only one. The very fact that Chaffey didn't vote for his own president's and party leader's re-election ought to be pretty decisive as to where he's coming from. He's a Republican running and governing as a Democrat. He's a RINO if there ever was one.

So why is the Republican party backing Chaffey to the hilt? I don't understand.

As the AmSpecBlog boys put it, "the boys are back in town," and look at what their next order of business is going to be:

[N]othing captures Congressional nonsense better than Republican attempts to out-Democrat Democrats on gas prices. There's a populist demand to "do something," in spite of a spate of articles calmly explaining why the gas prices reflect lower supply and higher demand - basic economics. Instead of explaining the facts and sticking to market principles, Bill Frist and Denny Hastert will reportedly request an investigation into higher gas prices.

And guess who'll be leading that investigation:

The government should consider a tax on oil companies if they make excessive profits amid rising gasoline prices, a leading Republican senator said Sunday.

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said a windfall profits tax, along with measures to stem concentration of market power among a few select oil companies, could offer eventual relief to consumers hurting at the gas pump.

"I believe that we have allowed too many companies to get together to reduce competition," Specter said.

"They get together, reduce the supply of oil, and that drives up prices," he said. "In the short run, it's hard to deal with it for tomorrow. But I think windfall profits, eliminating the antitrust exemption, considering the excessive concentration of power are all items we ought to be addressing."

The Democrats were gleefully endorsing their opponents' suicidal adoption of their statist/interventionst approach - Senator Carl Levin got off the yowler that if President Bush backed this vicious assault on the energy industry, gas prices would plunge "within days" - but that's to be expected. Heck, I don't even begrudge it. The party of the Left should celebrate such an abject policy surrender from the party that is supposed to represent the Right, and sure as the devil wasn't elected to majority control to attack "Big Oil" for the idiocies of Big Government.

This isn't even the first time that this "Republican" Congress has gone down this cul de sac. But brother are they all getting in on it - Frist and Hastert, House Majority Leader John Boehner, and the White House is already running up the white flag on ANWR drilling for this year (and ordering a probe into "price gouging"). Even their rhetoric - "Republicans are sending a strong signal to would-be gasoline price gougers tat they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," cried Boehner's press release entitled GOP Leaders Take Action on Energy Prices to Safeguard Growing Economy. Next thing you know they'll all be showing up at Capitol Hill pressers wearing capes and big "R"s on their chests.

Which isn't to say that all Republicans are hopeless. Quin-boy noticed Bob Livingston on Fox News last Friday taking Eleanor Clift to school on energy policy:

She started in with all the tommyrot about how the high prices are Bush's fault, but he blew her out of the park with a concise list of policy mistakes for the last thirty years that led us to this point. E.g., Regs that keep refineries from being built. Regs that pretty much killed (until last year's energy bill, in one of that bill's few good provisions) the development of nuke energy here for thirty years. Prohibition of drilling within about a zillion miles of the oh-so-precious Florida coast, and in ANWR, AND off the coast even of states that want drilling (or appear to) such as Virginia. And so on. Note that all these policies go back to the Jimmy Carter days. Livingston made the case; he made it strongly and effectively.

But there's one thing different about Livingston as compared with his GOP colleagues - he's no longer in Congress. Which means that in his mind he has nothing to lose by being an unabashed advocate of free market energy policies, whereas Hastert and Fristy and the rest obviously (and foolishly) think they do.

Contrast this with Hugh Hewitt's downright pleading for some hint of a spine from the majority on energy policy:

[T]he House and Senate leadership have got to push ANWR to the center of the debate over gas prices. Juan Williams demonstrated on Fox News Sunday why the left cannot be taken seriously on energy. Brit Hume and Bill Kristol could not conceal their astonishment at Williams' inability to grasp the connection between prices and supply.

The good news is that voters are not going to be fooled by the arguments that untapped oil supplies don't matter to gas prices - if the debate actually occurs. Given the public's daily collision with the left's refusal to allow America to use its own oil, it will by legislative and political malpractice if the Republicans do not bring ANWR up for debate least monthly between now and November. [emphases added]

The debate is not going to occur because Republicans are "so scared of Dem-ogoguery that they run screaming away like scared two-year-olds," even though this is a fight tailor-made for them to win.

And yet despite it all, GOP governance will almost certainly continue.

I don't understand it.

UPDATE: NRO has a great deal to say about this topic today.

UPDATE 4/26: Comparing the President of the United States unfavorably to Chucky Schumer? Wow, Tony Blankley has really taken the gloves off.