For reporters and political animals, last week’s eruptions about Iraq in the U.S. House of Representatives was juicy stuff, injecting theater, high drama and heat into the chamber’s usually staid and predictable proceedings.  We wrote and chatted like crazy.

It was more than hot rhetoric -- that, we get plenty of all the time. 

What unfolded on the House floor was a display of raw passions, or as raw as the reps dare get without risking eviction. Some of it was so raw that, beyond audacity, it teetered on insanity, like when a Republican congresswoman from Ohio intimated that one of the most venerable members of the House -- a former Marine -- was a “coward” for suggesting that U.S. troops vacate Mesopotamia as soon as possible.

That woman, Rep. Jean Schmidt, would have known better had she read, or cared about, the House rules. They don’t allow personal attacks on colleagues or negative references to members of the Senate either. But, apparently, Schmidt was no more aware of the impropriety of that than of the inappropriateness of a woman in her 50s wearing a bow in her hair in public. Her words were subsequently “taken down,” meaning they won’t appear in the congressional record.

But, like words stricken from the record in court, Schmidt’s did their stinging best. The colleague she insulted was Rep. Jack Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who shook up the federal hierarchy a couple of days earlier by denouncing the war in Iraq as a lost cause that demands the remediation of troop withdrawal.

That’s Murtha as in Vietnam War vet, faithful visitor to the war-wounded and sick at Walter Reed Army Hospital; working class stiff; friend to generals and admirals; long-time member of the House. With two Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, Murtha is the polar opposite of a coward.

For all the excitement it afforded the bored and jaded, the episode bespeaks bad news for the American public and the politics that have all but totally subsumed the business of governance.

It is a continuation of the surreal 2004 presidential campaign in which the guy who played footsie with the military -- George W. Bush -- and the guy who skipped out of service -- Dick Cheney -- not only had the nerve to taunt and ridicule the guy who served -- John Kerry -- but got away with it.

It says that the Republicans learned nothing from that sorry behavior, have no regrets about it and have no compunction about smacking around the people who fought for the freedoms they now exploit.

Indeed, they have resumed labeling those who question the Iraq campaign in any way as “unpatriotic,” and of aid and comfort to the enemy. The Bushies are merciless with those higher-ups who challenge the rationale for the war, the timing of the war, the methods of the war, the cost of the war or the strategy of the war.

They fired economic adviser Larry Lindsey for setting the pre-war estimate embarrassingly high for an administration that was trying to sell it as affordable and partly self-sustaining.

They punked Colin Powell so badly that he quit the highest post any black American had ever held in U.S. government.

They made former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill out to be a semi-nutcase after he disclosed that talk about invasion Iraq began soon after Bush took office in 2001.

They demonized Richard Clarke, who sat before the 9/11 commission and famously acknowledged mistakes by him and others in the administration when it came to pre-9/11 intelligence.

They blew Valerie Plame’s CIA cover after her husband wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times refuting administration claims that Saddam Hussein had been uranium-shopping in Africa.

They demoted Bunnatine Greenhouse, a long-time, highly respected contracts monitor at the Army Corps of Engineers, after she questioned no-bid Pentagon contracts with Halliburton, the oil construction company once headed by Dick Cheney, who still makes money from the company and whose son-in-law is on Halliburton’s executive payroll.

We average folks don’t have to worry about character assassination. The administration will just continue to steamroll us with the formidable machinery of solidarity -- a White House, Senate, House and, soon, a Supreme Court firmly in one hidebound camp.  Dissent will be allowed but not tolerated.  The tyranny of the majority is here and now.