The Dallas Morning News the other day reported that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R TX) is concerned that the Republicans will lose control of Congress next week. Her concern is proof-positive of how indecent apparently decent people can be.

Senator Hutchinson has an honorable reputation among Texans. I’m fairly certain that she is considered by herself and many others as good, decent, honorable, fair, and honest. I’m also fairly certain that she is considered by herself and many others as having the best interests of the country and her constituents at heart. Yet her concern for the Republican control of Congress belies all of these.

The Republicans are not in danger of losing control of the Congress because they are Republicans, but because of their lies, especially those of the President and Vice President, the corruption, especially of those Congressmen affiliated with Mr. Abramoff, because of their cover-ups of that and other corruption, and because of their having sold their votes to special interests for financial and other perks, especially campaign contributions.

Yet no prominent Republican, certainly not Senator Hutchinson, publicly abhors the lying, not even those who promote Christian values, no prominent Republican, certainly not Senator Hutchinson,  abhors the corruption or else Republicans would be doing something about it, and, needless to say, no Republican, certainly not Senator Hutchinson, abhors the selling of their votes to special interests, especially since she continues to accept campaign contributions even though she already possesses a campaign chest 150 times bigger than that of her opponent. That, in itself, indicates that just like her corrupt Republican colleagues, greed motivates her actions.

If Senator Hutchinson, and anyone else in the Republican party, were really a decent person and had the interests of the nation and its people at heart, she would be concerned about the immorality, dishonesty, and greed of her partisan colleagues and not about losing control of the Congress, because the Congress cannot be fixed until its members are reformed. People motivated by remunerative concerns can never be expected to serve the nation’s interests or have the interests of its people at heart, because greed is a private vice, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, not a public virtue.

The decent people in this county have a dim view of Congress. The fact that Congressmen themselves don’t share that view clearly marks them as indecent people, regardless of how they think of themselves. Senator Hutchinson is, like all those like her in the Congress, merely a fraud, and the people and the press need to start treating her and those like has as what they really are. A spade is a spade, and it needs to be called one.