The title of this post is, of course, an oxymoron. What I refer to, specifically, is a statement Speaker Hastert made to the press today in which he said that he would fire any of his staff if it turned out that they hid information on Foley’s behavior from him. If you recall, a few days ago, Hastert loudly pronounced that “The Buck Stops Here.” Of course, at that time as well, he laid out the possibility that his staff might have been responsible.

It is plainly apparent, from their use of the vocabulary, that Republicans either have no understanding of the meaning of the words “responsibility” and “accountability,” or, more likely, that they use the words in crass falsehood, simply as props to make them appear that they are something which they are not.

Take Katrina, for example. Two weeks after Katrina hit, Bush publicly announced that he “took responsibility” for the government “not fully doing its job right.” However, in the two weeks prior to that, Bush and his administration tried to claim they were blameless, and if anything had gone wrong, it was because of the Democrats, the victims, or people lower on down the chain of command. They tried to blame everyone and everything except themselves, and only after none of it worked did they try that last-minute attempt at “responsibility”–and even then, it was couched in language that suggested that he hadn’t done much, if anything, wrong.

Furthermore, accepting responsibility and accountability does not simply mean that you have a press conference and stand there looking noble and get credit and kudos, and nothing bad happens to you. That’s what you hope will happen, because you are being so brave in taking responsibility. Real responsibility and accountability means that you pay a penalty because something wrong happened and you are the one to blame.

Among Republicans, however, the concepts of responsibility and accountability, when applied to themselves, has no penalty; they simply want you to admire them for being so responsible and accountable, and it ends there.

We’re seeing a replay of this with Hastert. He, his staff, and his proxies, after trying to claim that nothing wrong happened at all, have tried to blame the Foley matter on everyone except themselves. They tried to blame the Democrats (on several tacks: for breaking the story, or for enabling Foley, or for enabling immorality in general, or for having scandals themselves decades ago), the victims (they egged Foley on, they knew what they were doing), homosexuals generally or specifically (the “Velvet Mafia”), the media (conspiracy theories about holding back the story for timing effect), and finally, the old stand-by, the staff member or members who held back the story and didn’t tell the poor Republican politician about any of this.

I noted this behavior a year and a half ago:

So yet again, blame the Democrats, and when that fails, fall back on the villainous legal aide who single-handedly commits the deed without anyone else in the GOP knowing a thing about it. I gotta tell you, by now the GOP is rife with dastardly legal aides. They should do something about this infestation, ’cause it’s really making them look bad.

So Hastert’s current attempts to claim “responsibility and accountability” in the matter fall entirely flat. You can’t claim you are bravely taking responsibility and accountability only after trying to blame everyone else first. You can’t bravely take responsibility and accountability while at the exact same time claiming you did nothing wrong, and if there was anything wrong, it was your staff and not you. “The Buck Stops Here” means something entirely different.