TP-gate

I've been too busy excoriating Terri Schiavo's killers the past week to focus on much of anything else. Perhaps if this saga weren't so grim, I would have derived more amusement from the collapse of yet another Democrat/Big Media dirty trick.

There's a ton of links on this this morning (Powerline, In the Agora, and Fishkite, just to name a few) but the American Spectator's Prowler column is a nice synopsis.

Tell me if this doesn't sound more than a little familiar.

A major network breaks a "gotcha" story about a "mysterious, anonymous" memo floating around the U.S. Senate that is allegedly damaging, if not devastating, to the Republicans. All the rest of Big Media leaps in with both feet, echoing and propagating the "story," attempting to make it instant conventional wisdom. The Republicans deny that the memo came from them and disavow any knowledge of its source and contents.

Then the blogosphere starts fisking it and asking questions. It turns out that the memo is on blank paper rather than Senate office letterhead. The so-called GOP "talking points" sound like a left-wing parody the Onion might come up with. Then it's learned that the language is lifted almost verbatim from material on the Traditional Values Coalition's website, and that a reference to last weekend's emergency legislation referring the Terri Schiavo case for federal de novo review used the wrong Senate bill number.

As the purported Republican "scandal" starts to rapidly disintegrate, the major network - in this case, ABC, via the Washington Post - starts backpedaling, admitting that they don't know the source of this memo or, really, much about it at all. They downplay the "story," tuning down their formerly breathless rhetoric. And the person or persons responsible for running with it clam up and start heading for the tall grass.

The next stage is exposure and payback.

...Republican leadership staffers now believe the document was generated out of the Democratic opposition research office set up recently by Senator Harry Reid, and distributed to some Democratic Senate staffers claiming it was a GOP document, in the hope -- or more likely expectation -- that it would then be leaked by those Democrats to reporters. In fact, the New York Times stated that it was Democratic staffers who were distributing the "talking points" document.

Other Republican staffers blame not only Democrats but also the mainstream media, which once again put out a story to embarrass Republicans before checking all the facts first.

I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve asked myself why the GOP continues to pussyfoot around with these people. The establishment press is beyond their reach, but they’ve got the numbers to stick it to Dirty Harry and his despicable band of lying weasels.

The grounds for Senate Republicans launching “massive retaliation” for the Democrats’ “going nuclear” by filibustering judicial appointments passed the point of “overkill” a long time ago. Doesn’t the sheer weight of all these provocations at some point generate a “fusion” reaction that generates the political equivalent of Bikini atoll?

Or will the GOP succumb to the same political strain of Stockholm Syndrome that kept them in the minority for sixty years?