On Top Of The World . . .

I assume that John 'Hindrocket' Hindraker, of Power Line, has greater reasoning skills than he exhibits in this post. He is upset that Howard Dean is not getting in trouble for saying "we're going to use Terri Schiavo later on." Hindraker says:

Why is it it that when a minor Republican staffer wrote that the Schiavo case was a "great political issue," it was a scandal that was reported in every newspaper in America, whereas, when the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee says, 'We're going to use Terri Schiavo' in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the response is a yawn? I'm sure there must be a reason why Dean's comment is different, but offhand I can't think what it is.

Hindraker can't figure out what the difference is because he excised the portion of the quote from the Los Angeles Times article (registration) that explained it. The Times wrote , "'We're going to use Terri Schiavo later on, Dean said of the brain-damaged Floridian who died last month after her feeding tube was removed amid a swarm of political controversy. Dean, who has called congressional intervention in the Schiavo case 'political grandstanding,' singled out House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) for his leading role in the matter." (emphasis added)

The italicized portion of the article makes clear to me that Dean intends to make hay over the Republican's, and specifically, Tom DeLay's political use of Schiavo case; which is very different from the Republican attempt to directly intervene in the case for political benefit (I assume that there was at least some genuine principle involved).

John Hindraker, who really wanted to believe that a memo hyping the political benefits of intervention for the Republicans was actually a Democrat dirty trick, should be careful. He and his colleagues were made "Blog of the Year" last year for their role in exposing the Dan Rather/fake memo business. It seems to have gone to their head -- their reasoning is often careless, and they make a lot of baseless charges. I wrote in a recent issue of the American Conservative that, "there was no blogosphere to speak of in 2000; it was a huge story by 2004. Dan Rather succumbed to the arrogance of power and never saw his downfall coming. There is no reason to assume that the same fate can’t befall a few big-name bloggers by 2008." The guys at Power Line are ripe for such a downfall.