Josh Marshall's excellent take on the Big Picture, and on emails vs IMs

StefanX

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Mon Oct-02-06 06:04 PM
Original message

Josh Marshall's excellent take on the Big Picture, and on emails vs IMs

Edited on Mon Oct-02-06 06:06 PM by StefanX

Here's Josh Marshall's take on the big picture in Foleygate:

I've gotten a lot of questions about the larger political impact of this debacle. So I'd like to draw back for a moment to take stock of that question.
...
Foley's downfall has pretty nearly decapitated the leadership of the House GOP with just five weeks to go before election day. And that's devastating.
...
The simple fact is that to the ext{e}nt campaigning determines the outcomes of elections, the race goes to the side that can remain on the offensive most consistently and define the national debate on its own terms. Foleygate has made it very hard for the leaders of the House GOP to go on the offensive on anything relevant to the election.
...
For political purposes they're basically out of commission... This is in the context of an election that was already going very badly for House Republicans. Foleygate has now made them all but politically defenseless in the final stretch of the campaign. And that is a very big deal.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010107.php

Josh's writing style usually strikes me as fairly muted and sober (except that time when he talked about "tectonic plates" -- and there's still time for those tectonic plates to shift once Libby gets dragged into court this January!), so when Josh uses words like "decapitated" and "devastating", that shows how bad it really is this time for the Republicans.

Democratics can easily tie all these Republican failures together by saying stuff like:

Republicans always say:

WE DIDN'T KNOW!
WE HAD NO IDEA!
NOBODY COULD HAVE IMAGINED!
- THAT FOLEY WOULD TRY TO HAVE SEX WITH UNDERAGE PAGES
- THAT THE LEVEES WOULD BREAK
- THAT TERRORISTS WOULD USE AIRPLANES AS WEAPONS.

Notice a pattern here? Had enough of these know-nothing, do-nothing Republicans already?

=====

Also worth checking out: a TPM reader demolishes the Republicans' attempt to finesse the whole emails-versus-IMs thing:

TPM Reader JM gets it ...

There's a weak excuse emerging from Republicans for Foleygate - they might have known about the e-mails to Rep. Alexander's page, but they never knew about the explicit IMs {instant messages}. Too much of the media coverage right now is centering on that question, as if knowledge of the IMs is the only way to show the leadership was remiss.

But that's irrelevant, and here's why: Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That's what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn't want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That's just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.

Exactly. Hastert's et al.'s defense here seems to be that their hands were firmly clasped over their ears. They never knew.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010113.php