This is your GOP

E.J. is one of my favorites and he is obviously as pissed off as I am. Read his column, but here are a few select quotes:

Oh my goodness, as Don Rumsfeld might say. Support for the Iraq war hits a record low, and all the president's hit men decide that it's time to smear their opponents as defeatists who give aid and comfort to the enemy.

--snip

The gentlemen who have gotten us into a mess in Iraq prefer not to explain how they'll fix things. They would rather use national security for partisan purposes, and they were all out there on Wednesday, spewing incendiary talking points. Hey, they may not have sent enough troops to win a war, but they sure know how to win midterm elections.

--snip--

Then there was Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, handpicked by President Bush and Karl Rove.

Speaking in Cleveland, Mehlman couldn't resist starting with a little old-fashioned redbaiting. He explained Ronald Reagan's defection from the Democratic Party this way: "He saw the beginning of the end, as a party that had vowed to fight communism became a party that set itself against those who fought communism." Ah, yes, the party of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale was nothing but a bunch of anti-anti-communists.

--snip--

Finally, from Tony Snow, the White House official who speaks for the president, came this analysis of the Connecticut result: "It's a defining moment for the Democratic Party, whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they're going to come after you."

This statement is rooted in a lie -- or, to be polite, fiction. As Adam Nagourney noted in the New York Times yesterday: "In fact, the vast majority of Democratic Party leaders supported Mr. Lieberman in the primary and did not endorse Mr. Lamont until after the results were in." On Time.com, Perry Bacon Jr. noted that Lieberman had the support of "almost the entire Democratic establishment."