Too Strange for Sisterdale. That was the name of an eclectic Hill Country music group some years back that took its title from the tiny Kendall County community tucked in Sister Creek Valley. To give you some perspective, Sisterdale lies about one beer south of Luckenbach and an equal distance east of Comfort, depending on your thirst.

The band’s name always kept me guessing. Which Sisterdale were they too strange for? Too strange for the utopian Sisterdale that was founded in the mid-1800’s by music-and-literature-loving, Latin-speaking German freethinkers who held steadfast to their anti-slavery, pro-Union views even during the Civil War, and counted among their fellow colonists a brother-in-law of Karl Marx? Or too strange for the peaceful, conservative farming community Sisterdale later became, with its cotton gin and general store, and which it pretty much remains today? My view was that these country-jazz-blues musicians meant they were too strange for whichever Sisterdale you lived in—liberal or conservative, eccentric or conventional, right-wing or left. In one way or another we all live in Sisterdale, and in the end, there is nothing too strange for Sisterdale. So I thought.

I know now why the name has stuck in my head for these past weeks like a repetitious verse from a skipping record. It’s the Bush Administration and its fellow travelers in Congress who are Too Strange for Sisterdale.

Given the opportunity to make headway against the Republican influence-vending scandal plaguing our country, GOP leaders instead voted to stay the course, electing Ohio Rep. John Boehner—Tom DeLay lite—as House Majority Leader to replace the indicted Texas Congressman who is known as a close friend of former lobbyist, now-felon, Jack Abramoff. Boehner wasted less than 24 hours in the job before he jettisoned an ethics and lobbying reform package touted by Speaker Dennis Hastert just the day before. It was simply too restrictive, Boehner said, and Hastert dutifully concurred. Wrestling is in Hastert’s past, and such conversions now come easily to him. After all, it was Hastert who changed the House Ethics Committee rules to protect DeLay when the The Hammer’s troubles began boiling out of the pot.

But it gets better—or worse—for those of us who live in this Sisterdale-of-a-nation. Not content to put its elephant foot in the gut of America just once, the Republican “leadership” then awarded DeLay a spot on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Fittingly, DeLay takes the seat of Duke Cunningham (R-CA), who resigned from the House as a result of his bribery indictment and conviction. GOP leaders also put DeLay on the subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department—the department looking into Abramoff’s dealings with lawmakers, including DeLay. There’s nothing like taking reform seriously.

Then there’s the spectacle of Alberto Gonzales, our Attorney General who heads that Justice Department, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain why the President, who is sworn to defend the Constitution, has been engaging in illegal wiretapping. The only defenses I heard were that “the President is not a lawyer,” and, besides, the law means what the President says it means. Apparently the President can’t get good legal help these days. The tone of disregard for law was set at the outset of the hearings when Sen. Arlen Specter, the committee’s chair, mindlessly refused to place Gonzales under oath and was supported in that effort by his Republican colleagues. The last thing we expect of anyone on “our side” is to swear to tell the truth. There’s just too much potential “responsibility” there.

All these events and others swirled against the backdrop of a State of the Union Speech that will go down as one of the worst in history when its strong words are measured against today’s dark and fractured reality. The President said we must rid our addiction to oil by cutting foreign dependence by 75 percent. Yet, not a day passed before we were told that this was merely metaphorical. He didn’t really mean it, our Energy Secretary said, and the Vice-President hurriedly backed up the secretary. Saudi Arabia and a host of other countries, where our energy dollars finance the terrorism we fight, were reassured.

Meaningless and contradictory words and actions are no surprise from a President who last year told the public that a government wiretap requires a court order. It was most assuredly figurative, too, when the President promised to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after the devastation of Katrina—a name never mentioned during his January address to the nation. Or the repeated promise to be the “Education President,” while submitting a budget that effectively cuts college funding for children of the middle class and below. Or supporting our troops by seeking a 13 percent reduction in veterans’ health benefits over the next five years. Or in describing himself as a fiscal conservative, while in real life having never met a spending bill worthy of a veto, and amassing deficits that will smother our children’s economic future. For the GOP, it’s say one thing, do another.

Now comes word from Scooter Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s former right-hand man now under indictment, that his then-superiors (who along with the Justice Department are on a current hunt to find the leaker of the illegal wiretap story) authorized him to disclose classified information to journalists in 2003 for the political purpose of defending an ill-conceived war. CIA Director Porter Goss must have gone apoplectic when that news broke, having already penned an op-ed PR piece that appears in today’s New York Times. People who disclose classified information, said Goss, “are not noble, honorable or patriotic. . . . Instead they are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk.” Spin that one, Mr. McClellan.

Some have described these last few political years as Kafkaesque, as ones marked by surreal distortion and a sense of foreboding. For me, I expect Rod Serling to step into view at any moment with a parable that will explain all this, as the bizarre dimension of the Twilight Zone fades to black on the screen.

However one describes this Republican bait-and-switch—this fog-and-sunshine, night-and-day, oil-and-water, yes-and-no all at the same time—one thing is coming into focus: It’s much too strange for Sisterdale.

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