Those zany congressional conservatives are at it again; again, that is, at unbroken pace. For when it comes to laugh-out-loud hypocrisy you just can't keep a good conservative down, and the hilarity mounts. Add George W. to the mixture as the elected packhorses' ideological guide and, well, there you have it: a full-blown Mel Brooks production of a political farce.

Here's the latest example of piled-higher-and-deeper Republican hypocrisy. And this is a bonus week. It's a doubleheader.

Addressing negotiations over the Medicare prescription benefits bill now in conference, the House Ways and Means chairman, Bill Thomas, chastised Democrats for snarling things up. Publicly, he said, they act as though they want to cooperate, while privately, as the New York Times put it, Democrats are "making unreasonable demands." (No doubt these include some statutory expression of a social conscience.)

With all the somberness of a burial plot salesman, Mr. Thomas lectured: "You have to practice bipartisanship all the time, not just in front of the cameras." Yes, he -- the same who days before called the Capitol Police to have Democrats ejected from the Ways and Means library -- said that indeed. He said it in relation to a House bill written almost in its entirety by House Republicans, now being conferenced almost entirely by G.O.P. lawmakers. The unremitting exclusion of Democrats from the negotiating process led Representative Charlie Rangel of the bad-boy crowd to joke that he only hoped Republicans would at least let his party know when and where decisions will be made.

Mr. Thomas's daft, over-the-top hypocritical show will, of course, only help to secure his reelection.

As an aside, Thomas issued his lecture after a meeting between the president and 17 members of Congress, in which Mr. Bush urged bipartisanship and a quick resolution of differences. When asked if the president offered any suggestions on how to achieve those goals, one senator reported, "No. None." It's leadership like that that has produced domestic tranquility, a peaceful postwar Iraq and international accord in general.

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The doubleheader's second part was played out by upstart conservative congressman Paul Ryan, also of the Ways and Means Committee. Said he about the prescription drug bill with a profundity little resurrected since Barry Goldwater's heydays, "If we don't get this right, we're going to get European-style socialism in this country." The congressman neglected to point out the pertinent downside, but I say amen to that and God bless America.

Yet the distinctively odd angle of Mr. Ryan's statement was reflected by his own colleagues. In the midst of pondering the evils of socialism, the Republican-dominated House passed a bill -- with no debate -- ensuring its own comfortable drug benefits way beyond Medicare benefits once members begin sagging and drooling beyond even Congress's pale.

Under Ryan's rugged individualist concept of a drug prescription plan, socialist Medicare beneficiaries would be required to pay premiums, deductibles and full costs from around $2000 to $6000 a year. That's only fair -- the slackers. They didn't take the good time and trouble to capitalistically buy their way into America's truest socialist institution, the United States Congress, where drug premiums be damned along with nagging deductibles and hellacious out-of-pocket expenses.

As if that slap in the face to America's seniors wasn't enough, the House justified its self-interested padding by saying if it dropped its dynamite coverage, then, in the words of an excellent (NY) Buffalo News editorial, "many private-sector employers also will drop their coverage in favor of Medicare." Integrity, always integrity.

If I were an "age-appropriate" target of conservative malice on Medicare, I doubt I'd see the same level of humor in all this. I would, however, return fire with malice on election day. Conservative hypocrisy -- which includes any sympathetic congressional Democrat -- has reached critical mass.

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© Copyright 2003 P. M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.