White House spokesman Dan Bartlett this morning on MSNBC: "Karl was giving a speech in which he was pointing out obvious public record."
Huh, I'd love to know what's in the obvious public record that Senator Durbin is motivated by a desire to murder US troops. That I didn't give a damn about September 11, and that I and most of you didn't want to go after the Taliban in Afghanistan, since in fact something like 95% of all Dems were on board with the war.
So, what "obvious public record" showed that Senator Durbin's "motive" was to kill the troops? What obvious public record showed that Democrats wanted to give Osama therapy?
Tim Grieve writes on Salon:
Ah, says Mehlman, but those were Democrats. "Karl didn't say the Democratic Party," Mehlman told the Washington Post. "He said liberals."
Well, that's just great then. Can we now assume that Mehlman and his fellow Republicans have decided that they'll no longer use the word "liberal" to refer to "Democrats" generally? From here on out, will Mehlman insist that his party-mates make a careful distinction between, say, "Democrats" like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and "liberals" like Michael Moore?
Don't count on it: Republicans have put years of work into making "liberal" a dirty word, and they're going to keep on using it to describe Democrats every time they can. Indeed, Mehlman's careful distinction between "Democrats" and "liberals" didn't even survive the duration of Rove's slanderous speech. After charging that the comments of "Democrat" Dick Durbin were "putting our troops in greater danger," Rove said: "No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
But Durbin was one of the "Democrats" who voted in favor of the post-9/11 resolution, so he isn't a "liberal" under Mehlman's definition. So how do Durbin's remarks reveal the true motives of "liberals"? We thought "Democrats" and "liberals" were different things, Ken? Or could it be that Rove was just wrong?
