We Fired You For Stuff We Didn't Know About When We Did It

Representative Chris Cannon (R-UT) is a big fan of time travel, apparently, because he thinks Justice Department officials traveled back in time to fire someone for something they didn't know about when they actually fired him.

Cannon is claiming that the Justice Department was right in firing US Attorney David Iglesias because a couple of weeks before they fired him, he received inappropriate calls from members of Congress who pressured him to bring indictments against Democrats prior to the November 2006 elections, in order to influence those elections -- but Iglesias didn't report the calls, as apparently required by Justice Department regulations.

However, the Justice Department supposedly didn't know about the calls when they fired him. According to Cannon's logic, if you do something for an inappropriate reason, and then later you learn something that would make a better reason, it doesn't matter why you did it in the first place. The reason you dug up later trumps the actual reason you did it.

Naturally. I mean, if a cop shoots someone just because he doesn't like him, but later it turns out that the guy the cop shot was a criminal, then it's okay that the cop shot him, right? Perfectly reasonable.

But Cannon's logic is even worse than that. The reason Iglesias was fired in the first place is because he wasn't willing to violate his professional ethics and Justice Department regulations by bringing politically-motivated indictments at times beneficial to Republican politicians. And part of the case against him in that regard is that he didn't bow to the pressure put on him by the members of Congress who called him, and causing those members of Congress to complain about him to the Justice Department.

So, in essence, Cannon's argument is that even though Iglesias was fired for not bowing to inappropriate political pressure, his failure to report that inappropriate political pressure to the people who fired him -- for refusing to bow to that pressure -- puts Iglesias in the wrong and he should be fired.

What?!? I almost need a diagram to make that even make sense.

Can it be any clearer that the Republicans don't live on the same planet as the rest of us? How did Cannon even come up with this tortured rationalization anyway? To paraphrase Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, "No human would argue like this."