After getting his ears pinned back at town-hall meetings, Democrat Rep. Rick Boucher — from Virginia’s coal country — tried a little pretzel logic to explain his support for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that squeaked through Congress. In an editorial-board meeting of a local paper in his district — the Kingsport Times-News — Boucher defended his vote in favor of the legislation that President Obama has promised will “bankrupt” coal and cause your “electricity rates [to] necessarily skyrocket”:

Boucher added the easy thing for him to do with the cap-and-trade bill would have been to just vote no.
“And I could have done that,’ he said. “But that would have been a cowardly thing to do, and it would not have served well the interests of the district I represent with its large coal industry and the fact that so much of the electricity we consume is coal-generated. . . . I would have been out of the debate.

Really? So the bad bill’s passage was a given and you were just making sure you had table-cred when it comes time for a Pelosi-Waxman selected group of hard-cores to play hardball with the Senate on a final version? No word in this story about all of those Members like Alan Grayson who cut deals to get something for their vote, which is usually a sign that the bill is otherwise not in fact going to pass.

Nope. Courageous Rick Boucher merely kept himself in the debate by providing a crucial vote to ram a partisan bill through — one he didn’t like but, after passing it, promises to fix it in conference . . . one of Washington’s least credible assertions, thanks to the ravages of practical experience.

This stance is like the Obama administration and its congressional enablers claiming we need to unilaterally pass an enforceable CO2 rationing scheme to give us leverage at the international table where we are trying to convince China, India, Mexico, South Korea, Brazil and the rest of the world to do the same thing. You see, our seriousness of purpose will wow them to come around to our way of thinking.

Because that has worked so well before . . . in, ah . . . in . . . well, it’s a great idea.

Now, back to you Washington types and your silly aphorisms dripping with treacle like “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” If you’re on the menu you’re on the menu. And cynical politicians like Rep. Boucher are doing the carving, even if they tell you haw bad they feel about it while sharpening the knife.