Coming to Theatres: The Memo (Can You Teach Me How To Fight?)

Democrats are, rightfully, giddy about today's revelation that the infamous Republican Schiavo memo was legitimate after all. It's a wonderful smackdown of all the mouth-breathing Powerline and friends have been grunting over it lately. Rather-Gate was a one-time affair, folks. Deal with it.

I don't completely buy it. I think there's a pretty good chance that the memo was faked on purpose. Say you're a strategist in the Republican party. You think that exploiting Schiavo's death will benefit the party by riling up an already ecstatic base. However, you're concerned that the media might suddenly drop ranks from behind you and consolidate around the recognition of your party's exploitation.

You remember the success of Rathergate. If those documents had been valid, they would have helped solidify the truth they were representing to the public. Instead, the forgery discredited the accusations and they didn't really take off like the Swift Boats attacks did.

So you write a quick memo. You want to make sure the lower levels of the food chain know what to do with it, so you make their job really easy: you misspell the name of the woman, which has been splashed all over every news channel for weeks, cite the wrong bill, don't put it on any letterhead, etc. The right-wing blogs jump at the opportunity to prove their relativity once again, and, with enough pressure, they will hopefully elevate the discussion to the MSM. Then you get to paint Democrats as a bunch of dishonest partisans just trying to tarnish the good name of the GOP.

Partisan hackish? Sure. Naievely executed? Definately. But definately not surprising.