Why Bush's party deserves to be despised

Bob Herbert writes today in The New York Times:

The war in Iraq will be remembered as one of the greatest exercises in systematic governmental deceit in U.S. history. But the Iraq fiasco is just the most stunning and tragic example of a style of governing and politicking that has become second nature to the Bush administration and much of the national Republican establishment...

In a move that was typically and patently deceitful, Republicans in Congress tried to pass a minimum wage measure last week in which the biggest winners would have been some of the wealthiest people in America...

In exchange for this estate tax bonanza for the fabulously wealthy, the G.O.P. was willing to approve a $2.10-an-hour increase, stretched over three years, in the miserly $5.15-an-hour minimum wage. It was made clear [emphasis mine] that any Democrats who dared oppose this raid on the Treasury would be targeted by Republicans as obstructionists blocking a sorely needed wage hike for the lowest-paid workers in the nation...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declared that Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington who voted against the bogus bill, “decided that giving in to pressure from her party’s leadership was more important than voting to raise the federal minimum wage.”

Senator Cantwell, who is up for re-election this year, favors an increase in the minimum wage, as does her party’s leadership. It has been the Democratic Party that has been pushing for years for an increase in the minimum wage, but there is no room for that reality in the G.O.P.’s corrosive culture of deceit.

Mr. Herbert's article appears on the web, but by"Times Select" subscription only.