Personally my attitude toward the use of profanity in public speech is that it should be avoided; its overuse is prima facie evidence of a limited vocabulary. In private speech over a beer at a pub, say, it might be perfectly acceptable, and I’ve been known to engage in it in such situations. Conflict or infatuation might call into service the terms of naughtiness. But polite conversation only rarely requires the use of terms that make the nicest members of society cringe.

Still, there are times when one feels inclined by the weight of circumstance to point out that there are among the Republican members of the Senate some people who can only be accurately described as sleazy-ass motherfuckers.

In a letter to their fellow senators today, the environment panel’s Republicans throw every rhetorical weapon in their arsenal at the Obama administration for putting revenues from carbon regulation in its budget. What they’re afraid of is what the energy industry has called the “nuclear option,” a budget item for climate change that would fast-track the bill to passage.

And to help strangle that option, the Republicans have renamed cap-and-trade emissions limits. They’re now being christened an “energy tax,” which creates a nice opening to slam Democrats as tax-hikers.

No truth, no class, no honor, no courage, no brains, no heart, no foresight. It would seem an argument against evolution that such humans even exist.

What these of our fellow citizens find off-putting, of course, is the idea that a majority of Americans, represented by a majority of both houses of Congress and supported by the President, might decide to take one of the most obvious steps toward reducing our impact on the climate of the planet with a cap-and-trade scheme.

In recent years such schemes have been well analyzed and debated; and as far as I can see, they’re not really controversial among people with a serious interest in saving the planet. I don’t mean to overstate the case.

Of course there is disagreement about whether cap-and-trade is the best method of making economics heal rather than exploit, not to mention whether this attempt implements cap-and-trade well and appropriately. These are natural debates, conflicts of the style endemic to democracy. Interests sometimes oppose each other, for instance the financial interests of industries based on fossil fuels as against the survival of the human race, et cetera. Argumentation might help to illuminate the situation to the widest audience, or even reveal hidden motives or hypocrisies; thus, it would seem, the First Amendment.

The thing is that the GOP has thrown in the towel on the overt argument that climate change is bullshit, and is scrambling for a new cover story. Limited by the available toolset and the preferences of the base, they tend to concentrate on labeling, assuming that after the disasters of conservatism from Reagan through Bush through Clinton through Bush the country is still all about that old-time religion of everyone for themselves: I can afford my own health care and schools and private security, and if you can’t, well, join the army. If you survive your stint you’ll get a parcel of land in an outlying colony. Oh, woops, that was Rome, my bad. Well, at least you won’t have to live under a bridge.