Trump's Taxes & GOP Science Denial: Morals Are For Losers

Today's Republican Party is less about any particular principle or set of values than it is about being willing to completely abandon any morals whenever the party machinery demands it:

Donald Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said Sunday morning that she does not want the Republican presidential nominee to release his tax returns until an audit by the Internal Revenue Service is completed, abandoning a position that she took five months ago, when she didn't work for the campaign and urged Trump to "be transparent" and release the filings.

We've seen similar courage of convictions from Republican senators like John McCain and Lindsay Graham. They spoke out on global warming when it served their maverick images, but that was the high water mark of their climate courage. They abandoned the cause when the party feared a climate & clean energy bill might actually pass in 2010 and have stayed quiet on carbon pollution limits ever since.

As Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times today, "climate denial has become a sort of badge of right-wing identity, above and beyond the still-operative motive of rewarding donors." And now so is denying that Americans have a right to know what a presidential candidate is hiding in his tax returns.

Meanwhile, as Trump demands Hillary Clinton release every email she ever wrote, his new campaign CEO calls it a "smear" when Greenpeace uses the Freedom of Information Act to access some of a polluter scientist's emails. Morals are for losers!