11/01/2006

In Brief: The Republican Law of Rovean Responsibility:
So let's see if the Rude Pundit can get this straight, 'cause, see, sometimes his mind can't grapple with the logic of the right:

A lefty blogger trying to ask Republican Senator George Allen impolite questions in a public space is tossed around and assaulted by Goons for Allen (an organization whose 501c3 status is pending), and Republican Senator Liddy Dole says that it's an example not of how arrogant and abusive amoral Allen's asshole assistants are, but of how low the campaign of Allen's opponent, Democrat James Webb, has sunk.

A Republican member of Congress, Mark Foley, is revealed to have been regularly coming on to teenage male pages through internet messaging, a fact that was known to, at the very least, top staffers for the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives, and those very Republicans declare not that they fucked up, but that Democrats are actually responsible for covering-up for Foley.

The Republican President of the United States regularly "misspeaks", where he ends up admitting things like that his job is to "catapult the propaganda" about issues and comparing his brush-clearing injuries with those of wounded soldiers when he said, "As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself—not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch," and the mainstream media ignores such statements as minor slips of the tongue, not indicative of the character of the man or the content of his policies, but explodes with massive coverage of a tripped-up joke by Democratic Senator John Kerry, deciding that a decorated war vet must hate the troops for trying to say that the President is a hunched-over baboon.

Is there any crime that can't be deflected, any ethical lapse that can't be denied, any standard to which the Republicans can be held? We're beyond accountability. We're into some bizarro Nixonian region of plausible deniability.