Republican Games Gone Bad

It’s history rewrite time again. If facts don’t fit your agenda, then it’s time to lie.

I got a short listen to Mark Davis this morning. He was dodging around the Harriet Meirs issue. Clearly he’s already working to circumnavigate the whole affair and spin it as though it was just a painful accident. And that’s pretty much what I expected from Mark. He doesn’t invent new facts to contradict old ones. He tends to wait until Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity redefines what is true or false, and then toes the party line. Rush should start giving us a good idea about which lies will become gospel and which will be dropped in favor of new truths.

The gist of what Mark was saying is that the Harriet Miers nomination was just an unfortunate accident. Now the Republicans have the candidate they should’ve had all along. He went on to argue that the Dems should just accept this nomination without question, because the Republicans are in charge. And just like in the Clinton years when the Republicans were nice and followed the Dems like puppies in their nominations, the Dems should return the favor. Mark was basically telling the Dems to shut up and drink the Kool-Aide.

I’ve disagreed with this whole Miers controversy from the beginning. The Republicans, being the drama queens that they are, felt they needed some controversy over their first pick for this Supreme Court seat. So right away, before anyone even knew that Miers was going to be nominated, they began shouting that the Dems were going to filibuster and fight the nomination. Then it was announced and they started shouting, see! They’re against anyone we pick!

But the truth in what the Dems were arguing was really just ‘Hunh’? And the silence on the Dems side was deafening. There was no cry for filibuster from the Dems. There were no screams of outrage. There was simply the question of, “Why Harriet?”

But we did get screams of outrage. We got them from the Republican side. Evidently many of the Republican representatives have never seen this play performed before, or they had just forgotten it, as our collective attention spans are so short. They didn’t realize that Harriet wasn’t intended to get the appointment. She was put forth as a sacrificial lamb for the Dems to chew on. But she was a poor pick for this and a big miscalculation. Instead of the Dems screaming in outrage, it was the Republicans. What screwup!

Now what I expect to hear in Alito’s nomination is the nonsense that the Democrats can’t be pleased with anyone the Republicans pick, so why not settle on Alito and suck it up. Mark tried hard to spin to this position, using the truth, but the truth is not on the side of this argument. Really, if you used the facts, he should be telling the Republicans that were outraged over Miers to suck it up. So today, I’m predicting that Rush Limbaugh will use selective facts and invent new lies to show that the whole Miers debacle was really the fault of the Dems. Over the next few days, he’ll be lying about how the Republicans were soundly behind Miers and it was the Dems attacks on her Christian values that prevented her from becoming a Justice. Then the rhetoric about how the Dems hate every Republican candidate will begin.

It’s a shame though that many of the Republican Candidates were unable to see this ploy shaping up from the beginning. Now it’s obvious to everyone that Rove is really off his game. He didn’t think this through and made a bad choice. Or even worse, he’s so busy in his own defense, he’s letting Bush make his own decisions. Had the Republicans been on their game, they could’ve solidly stood behind her, magnified any Democratic objections, then let her turn down the nomination so their real pick could be presented.