Train jumps tracks
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Only weeks ago, GOP campaign officials were breathing smoke and fire. According to Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, R-N. Y., the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, hapless Democrats had no idea what they were up against. Relentlessly negative TV commercials funded by the party’s $ 50 million war chest were about to bury Democratic candidates under an avalanche of charges dug up by so-called opposition research—unpaid student loans, late tax payments, embarrassing lawsuits, etc. “We haven’t even begun to unload this freight train,” Reynolds boasted to The New York Times. Asked why the party that currently controls the White House and both houses of Congress wasn’t stressing positive themes in its TV ads, he burst out laughing. “If they moved things to the extent that negative ads move things,” he said, “there would be more of them.”
A few days later, Reynolds himself got run over by an off-schedule freight train in the form of the nastiest Washington sex scandal in decades. It’s doubtful he’s laughing now. Reynolds, see, is the guy who says he and Rep. John Boehner, ROhio, warned House Speaker Dennis Hastert last spring about Rep. Mark Foley’s “overly friendly” e-mails to 16-yearold congressional pages.
The speaker recalls no such meeting.
(snip)
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/169340/That was one of the first things that crossed my mind, when I realized the Foley scandal was growing like mold in a freshly-drained New Orleans shotgun house: "Hey, I thought it was the REPUBLICANS who were threatening to haul out the DIRT?"
After all, I had just read an article about their diabolical plan, right here on DU. I remembered hoping that the other DUers and our candidates would take their threats the way I took them: by not backing down.
It seems REALITY got the better of planned propaganda. The Foley scandal is REAL--not like the planned smear-jobs the republicans were threatening. Finally, reality wins a victory in this Orwellian looking-glass wreck of what used to be a country...