Memo to Conservative Bloggers: Better Luck Next Time

Ahh, the sweet taste of eat it, suckers!

Remember the GOP talking points memo, about what a political boon the Schiavo case was for the GOP, that the wingnuts were convinced, just totally sure, was a fake created by the Dems?

Well, it turns out that it was written by an aide to Senator Mel Martinez (R-Florida). (AMERICAblog’s got a copy of the memo here.)

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

[…]

The unsigned memo -- which initially misspells Schiavo's first name and gives the wrong number for the pending bill -- includes eight talking points in support of the legislation and calls the controversy "a great political issue."

"This legislation ensures that individuals like Terri Schiavo are guaranteed the same legal protections as convicted murderers like Ted Bundy," the memo concludes.

It asserts that the case would appeal to the party's core supporters, saying: "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue."

To be completely honest, I don’t find the memo itself that outrageous, because all it really did was put on paper that which was already obvious about the Republicans in their current incarnation—they are inveterate political opportunists who seek to exploit and pander to their religious conservative base at every opportunity, in pursuit of ever greater amounts of political capital to spend on behalf of their corporatist base. That the talking points were put into writing doesn’t really matter one way or another to me.

What I found more outrageous was the insistence that it was a creation of the Democrats.

The mystery of the memo's origin had roiled the Capitol, with Republicans accusing Democrats of concocting the document as a dirty trick, and Democrats accusing Republicans of trying to duck responsibility for exploiting the dying days of an incapacitated woman.

Conservative Web logs have challenged the authenticity of the memo, in some cases likening it to the discredited documents about Bush's National Guard service that CBS News reported last fall.

It wasn’t just blogs who challenged the memo’s authenticity, however. Sure, Powerline blog, Michelle Malkin, La Shawn Barber, In the Agora, Newsmax, Accuracy in Media (an Orwellian name if ever there was one), and the other usual suspects chimed in with their charges of forgeries, but professional bloviator Rush Limbaugh, The Washington Times (twice), and bow-tied shill Tucker Carlson, appearing on the Chris Matthews' Show, were also positively certain that it was a Democratic dirty trick. Right, Tucker?

Last week a memo surfaced, reportedly written by the Republican members of Congress explaining how to make hay with the Terri Schiavo case, the Talking Points Memo, Ah, I think within a week or two it will become clear that that memo was a forgery, possibly written by Democrats on the hill in an effort to discredit Republicans.

Oops.

Nowadays, the Dems hardly need to resort to forged memos to discredit the Republicans; they’re doing such a fine job of discrediting themselves.