Oh, The Hypocrisy!

The Repugnant Ones never cease to amaze (negatively). Turn the TV on, open a newspaper these days, and you cannot escape a Republican talking head warning us that we must be careful not to allow Democrats to politicize the death of Sen. Kennedy to push through a health reform bill that the majority of Americans does not want. (Never mind the fact that the majority of Americans does support major reform, up to and including a public option, as evidenced here (PDF), here, and here, for example.) They say so IN SPITE OF THE FACT that they did just that when Ronald Reagan died, which happened just a few years ago, when you and I were all alive (as if we didn't remember.)

Not only that, the Repugnant Ones are already hard at work in trying to rewrite history to imply that if Sen. Kennedy were alive they would have worked with him to pass health care reform.

Thankfully, Rachel Maddow did her homework as usual and skewers the Repugnant Ones for what they are:

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Not only that: they are inviting Democrats to be more like Sen. Kennedy, whom they are painting as an example of the willingness to compromise and to find common ground. This AFTER they spent all their lives campaigning against Kennedy and his allies painting them all as too liberal for your own good. Just last year, when the presidential campaign was in full swing, this is what the National Review Online was writing about then Sen. Obama:

Republicans, however, insist that they can make hay by showing how liberal the Democratic nominee is. "Senator Obama's voting record, from what I have seen of it, tends to be very left-leaning," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. "I saw Senator Kennedy's endorsement of him as both an acknowledgement of that similar ideological view [...]

It takes people like Bob Bernick, of the Utahn newspaper Deseret News, to reminds us that--contrary to the revisionist Republican rewrite of Sen. Kennedy after his death, one that would almost make you think that the Massachussets senator must have been a moderate and a centrist--a major GOP strategy in Utah for decades was such that "[m]any Democratic Senate candidates from here would see and/or hear anti-Kennedy campaign ads, even if the local Democrats had never met Kennedy and didn't support much, if any, of his social agenda. Turn the local Democratic candidate into a Kennedy supporter and the opposing Republican would squash the Democrat in the general election."

In other words, you can have it both ways if you are a Repugnant One.