Remember That Was the Week That Was, popularly known as “TW3”? It was a ribald satire on the news that we imported from the BBC in the 1960s.  And it’s back.  At least it was back last week, in living color. 

Here’s how author Graham McCann described TW3 in his history of BBC comedy, Spike and Co. “Every hypocrisy was highlighted and each contradiction was held up for sardonic inspection. No target was deemed out of bounds: royalty was reviewed by republicans; rival religions were subjected to no-nonsense ‘consumer reports’; pompous priests were symbolically defrocked; corrupt businessmen, closet bigots and chronic plagiarists were exposed; and topical ideologies were treated to singeing critiques. No one was spared.”

And here’s how last week’s episode played out, a dozen news reports of chicanery, hypocrisy and foul play, all grist for the mills of TW3 satire.

1.  Bush’s brain, Karl Rove, played the “pompous” part with the release of his memoir.  I haven’t read it, but by all accounts it’s a brilliant rewrite of the history of the Bush administration, among other things spinning the ex-President into “a rare leader of conviction and moral clarity,” in the words of Washington Post reviewer Steven Levingston. 

Imbedded within Rove’s adulation of Bush and blindness to historical fact is the admission that the Iraq war probably would never have been authorized had the Bushies not insisted, against all evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and was harboring a weapons of mass destruction arsenal.

2.  Next came a “papal gentleman” and Vatican choir singer (non-priests both) snared in a gay sex-for-sale scandal.  It seems the choirboy, a Nigerian, for years had been procuring homosexual partners for the “gentleman,” actually an usher who escorted guests in to visit the Pope.  In his non-Vatican life, the usher is also an Italian public works official, now in jail for financial corruption.  Wiretaps on his phone during the investigation unexpectedly unearthed the sex liaison.  The choirboy sings no more.  The usher is still in jail.

3.  Then there’s the Republican National Committee’s master plan for “putting the FUN back in FUNdraising.”  Among other things, it reveals the party’s utter disdain for its own donors.  After RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart made a PowerPoint presentation to top GOP donors and fundraisers at a hotel in Orlando, Florida, someone left behind a hard copy.  Someone else picked it up and turned it over to Politico.com. 

Set aside its crude caricatures of President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  Tea partiers have already made that nonsense commonplace.  Far more damaging is that, according to Politico, small donors are considered “visceral” and “reactionary” and motivated by “fear” and “extreme negative feelings” toward the Obama Administration.  The slogan?  “Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”  In other words, sell fear.  It’s been working for Republicans ever since Joe McCarthy and the Great Red Scare, after all. 

Big donors, on the other hand are calculating and motivated by “peer pressure,” “access,” and “ego.”  But access to what?  The presentation bluntly asks, “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate?” The answer: a string of special events and “tchotchkes,” (more commonly spelled “chotchkies”).  The online Urban Dictionary defines a chotchkie as “a small piece of worthless crap, a decorative knickknack with little or no purpose.”  No kidding.

4.  Let’s not leave out the irrepressible Sarah Palin.  She went Hollywood, first as a stand-up comic on NBC’s The Tonight Show, then, alongside producer Mark Burnett of Survivor fame peddling to networks her very own reality TV show, in which cameras would follow her on visits to Alaskan fishing boats, coal mines and other charming spots in the state whose governorship she abandoned.  Doing her damnedest to not be taken seriously, it seems.  Or is it a clever, if unusual, launchpad for a possible presidential bid?

Speaking of abandoned positions, among the many this past week, one was particularly welcome – Obama’s abandonment of the charade of bipartisanship, something I’ve urged for months.  He has finally come around to advocating that Democrats push health reform through to completion.  They won’t get and don’t need Republican votes.  It takes two to tango, and Republicans don’t tango.  Democrats will now dance alone.

The package passed the House last November, then another version won a 60-vote super-majority in the Senate on Christmas Eve.  All the House now needs is to adopt the Senate’s version lock, stock and barrel, then reload and send the Senate a “fixer” bill to bridge their remaining differences, such as giving citizens the option of a publicly run insurance program.  The Senate can then enact that set of fixes under “reconciliation” rules that require only a simple majority, the way democracy was supposed to work.  Obama now appears to favor such a strategy, and it appears likely to succeed.

 But hold on, there’s much chicanery and hypocrisy afoot over this.

 5.  First up, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah).  With the death of his dear friend Edward Kennedy, Hatch appears to have lost his scruples or his marbles, I’m not sure which.  He wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday that Democrats plan “to ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill,” calling such use of reconciliation “unprecedented in scope.”

He claimed that reconciliation in the past dealt only with budget matters and when “other substantive legislation was included, …(it) had significant bipartisan support.”  Hatch even had the gall to quote Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (ND) that reconciliation was never “intended for the purpose of writing this kind of substantive reform legislation.”

 Rachel Maddow said it best on her MSNBC show:  “That is a total, utter, complete, 100 percent unambiguous lie.”

 Sen. Conrad himself responded in his own Post op-ed, in effect telling the gentleman from Utah he had his facts wrong.  “Substantive reform” had already passed the Senate, with 60 votes.  Reconciliation would be used only for the “fixes” and the bill “would…still have to meet the requirement that reconciliation be used only for deficit reduction.”  It would have to reduce the deficit by at least $2 billion over the first five years and be at least deficit-neutral beyond that.

 It should be noted “reconciliation” has been used 22 times since 1980, 17 times under Republican control of the Senate.  Republican presidents signed 14 of those 17 bills.  Significantly, in 2001 and 2003, Republicans used reconciliation to “ram” through Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, cuts that not only didn’t reduce the deficit, as required, but launched it into the stratosphere.  Hatch himself voted for a dozen reconciliation bills, including those two.  Who’s been doing the ramming all these years?

 When Maddow laid into Republicans for their “really, really, really blatant hypocrisy,” Hatch wasn’t alone in her Hypocrisy Hall of Fame.  To wit: 

 6.  Tennessee’s Sen. Lamar Alexander, for “denouncing” reconciliation as a “political kamikaze mission,” despite his having flown several such missions.

7.  Arizona’s Sen. John McCain, for proposing to outlaw reconciliation for any bills that involve entitlement programs, despite his prior reconciliation votes for such bills.

 8. And Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley, for proposing a federal mandate that people buy health insurance, then denouncing his own idea as unconstitutional.

 Of Hatch, Alexander, McCain and Grassley, Maddow concluded:  “All these guys are taking brave, brave stands in public against their own positions, against their own voting records, against their own purported beliefs….  You’re hypocrites!”

 9.  Mustn’t leave out the Democrats.  Not to be outdone, Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan was doing his best imitation of Republican Sens. Richard Shelby (Alabama) and Jim Bunning (Kentucky), two who recently gained fame for singlehandedly blocking government action in order to get their way, damn the consequences.

 10.  In Bunning’s case, last week he blocked temporary emergency unemployment benefits, highway projects and increased Medicare reimbursement for doctors unless the funds were found to pay for them.  Thousands of workers were furloughed before a deal was finally struck.  That would be principled had Bunning not voted with all other Republicans against the Democrats’ pay-as-you-go rule. 

 [Shelby’s case admittedly occurred earlier and consequently can’t make last week’s TW3 list.  Shelby had unilaterally held up release of about $1 billion in stimulus money for NASA unless the agency abandoned plans to scrap a rocket program in his state.  A deal was finally struck in February.]

 And Stupak?  He says he’ll kill health care reform unless the bill specifically incorporates his language to prevent federal funds from being used for abortions.  The Senate bill the House is being asked to pass verbatim already does that, if not with Stupak’s choice of words.  He misreads the legislation if he thinks otherwise, but if he succeeds, he loses, and so do the rest of us:  an amended Senate bill would have to go back to the Senate, probably not be allowed under reconciliation rules, and most likely fail to get its super-majority back, given the loss of the Massachusetts senate seat to Republican Scott Brown.  But hey, anything to grab attention during zany week, right Bart?

 11.  Then there’s pseudo-Democrat Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.  No sooner did a popular progressive, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, announce he was challenging her in the Democratic primary than she released her first campaign commercial, defiantly boasting of her vote against Bush’s bank bailout (she actually voted for it) and against auto company bailouts (both banks and automakers received loans that are being repaid), against public option healthcare and against cap-and-trade energy legislation.  She plainly dislikes everything on Obama’s agenda.

 12.  So what did both President Obama and former President Bill Clinton do?  They rushed in to endorse her!  How reminiscent is that of the Good Old Boys’ rallying ‘round Joe Lieberman in 2006 when he, too, was challenged by a true progressive?  Had they not done so, we may have enjoyed a few years of Sen. Ned Lamont rallying the Senate to such things as a more robust healthcare reform package.

 If you liked Joe Lieberman’s strategy these past few years, you’re gonna love another six years of Blanche Lincoln. 

 And that, friends, was the week that was.  Tell me it wasn’t the zaniest, chicaneriest show in a long time.  And we didn’t even get around to the intricacies of the scandals beleaguering those New York headliners, Rep. Charles Rangel and Gov. David Paterson, who, after all, are still the subjects of “ongoing investigations.”  Stay tuned.