You Don't Get To Choose Your Own Nickname

Grover Norquist must be upset that the Democrats are being so mean to him and his attempts to make lobbying a Republican-only enterprise. Instead of stopping the rampant corruption that's turned Waashington into a pay-to-play operation, he wants to copyright the name of that corruption:

Conservative activist Grover Norquist is seeking a trademark on “K Street Project,” saying Democrats and Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) have wrongfully acquired the term to describe unethical practices that have nothing to do with his organization.

Far from running away from the term, as most other Republicans have since January, when lobbyist Jack Abramoff agreed to plead guilty to corruption charges, Norquist is embracing it.

His project is a branch of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), which he heads. He says the project is an innocuous list of job openings for Washington lobbyists and a database of lobbyists’ political ties and federal campaign contributions.

The lists are circulated among high-level conservatives, with critics calling the efforts an improper “whitelisting” and “blacklisting” of potential hires [...]

“Some people say Kleenex when they mean tissue,” Norquist said. “We will jealously guard the real phrasing the way Kleenex and Coca-Cola do. We will sue anyone who says it wrong and make lots of money.”

It's interesting that Norquist singles out Boehner, who while caught in his own ethical web, at least ran on restoring some ethical balance to the Republican Party. This sounds like a desperate act by someone (Norquist) who's getting the door slammed shut on him for the first time in his life. After all, his good buddies Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed (and I'm not making that up, they all came up together in the College Republicans) are headed to jail. Norquist sees the whole party distancing themselves from him, and he can't understand why.

Poor baby. Time to lie in the bed you've made. The K Street Project was a Republican attempt to put partisans in lobbying positions, and it continues to this day. Nobody's distorting the meaning of the project by putting it in those terms. If the phrase suddenly has a negative connotation because it's seen as negative by most of the voting public, well, tough.