Finding the Good In Everything

Greg Sargent notices the story I read in the LA Times during my self-imposed blogging moratorium. It continues the familiar narrative that anything negative that happens to the Republicans is seen as a great victory.

GOP Sees Strategic Advantage in Court Loss on Wiretapping

WASHINGTON — This week's federal court ruling that declared the president's warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional was a blow to the Bush administration and a victory for its critics. But in a reversal, it is Republicans who are highlighting the decision and Democrats who are sidestepping it.

There have been about 20 different stories with this theme over the past 2 years. Literally anything that happens badly for the GOP becomes a positive for the party's electoral strategy. Basically, the media has been trash talked by Republican operatives into believing that anything they do ends up helping them. By this logic, they might as well walk out en masse from the Capitol, to "draw differences" with the weak Democratic caucus.

When you've been spun into thinking that a ruling which unequivocally states that the Administration is breaking the law is somehow a good thing, you've been spun pretty good.

And the Democrat they always find to confirm this notion is Marshall Wittman of the Progressive Policy Institute. Only the PPI is a front group for the DLC, Wittman is the former legislative aide to John McCain and the Christian Coalition, and literally no serious Democrat believes him or even takes him seriously. We really need a moratorium on having Marshall Wittman listed in articles as a "Democratic strategist." It makes a mockery of the "balance" that those stories reputedly provide.