Earlier this month, Lindsay Graham said he would support the START treaty once tax cuts for the rich were passed. He got his way, but now he is leading the charge of the whiners about all that voting:

Poor Senator Graham! Maybe he needs a really, really long vacation. After all, if he is too tired to protect us from nuclear war, even though the treaty has been on his desk for eight months.

Also ironic is that Graham is complaining about having to vote on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but the man who forced the lame duck vote on DADT (and even threatened too keep the Senate in session through Christmas to do it) was his close friend Joe Lieberman (Graham once called Lieberman a “national treasure“).

But seriously, what really bothers me about this is that Republicans don’t seem to care about whether something is, you know, actually good for the country. They are still caught in the Rovian trap of looking at everything through a partisan lens. A prime example is this editorial from conservative Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer seems unable to even conceive that Obama might actually care about what happens to the American economy, except how it affects his reelection chances. I guess when you are that cynical, you can’t imagine that anyone else isn’t also that cynical as well. {Maybe the Christian Science Monitor is right — Obama is the only grown-up in Washington.}

The end result is that most Republicans won’t vote for anything that might even look like a victory for Obama, even if — especially in the case of the START treaty and the Zadroga bill — it is clearly the right thing to do.

UPDATE: Dana Milbank thinks the Republican Party should be renamed the Petulant Party. And talking about their obstructionist tactics in the Senate, Republican leader Mitch McConnell put it “If they think it’s bad now, wait till next year.”