What the Definition of "is" Is.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said a litany of comments by Democratic elected officials and their liberal allies underscored Rove's point. "It is outrageous," he said, "that the same Democratic leaders who refused to repudiate or criticize Dick Durbin's slandering of our military are now attacking Karl Rove for stating the facts. . . . Karl didn't say the Democratic Party. He said liberals."

Oh, please.

How do they say such things with straight faces? After months and years of Republicans plastering the "L word" on Democrats, including even the most moderate ones just this side of Zell Miller, and doing so all throughout the campaign less than a year ago, we're suddenly supposed to believe he wasn't talking about Democrats? And the fact that, in that same passage, the two politicians Rove mentions by name are the current Chairman of the Democratic Party and a prominent Democratic Senator, that's what exactly? An odd coincidence?

Considering the flack they gave Bill Clinton for his self-serving parsing of phrases and sentences, this is particularly rich.

And even if there were some hypothetical crowd of "liberals" running around somewhere who were separate from the Democratic Party, would it have been any better for Rove to exploit 9/11 to attack them? What is he saying, that the Democrats should shut up because, despite the insult to the 9/11 families and the clear divisive intent, he was talking about...who? The Green Party? Ralph Nader? Some politically irrelevant time-warp band of American Socialists in a commune somewhere? Come on.

Is it as obvious to the rest of the country as it is to me that they've gone back to the Swift Boat playbook because their poll numbers are in the crapper and the Democrats and press are gettin' uppity?

(Oh, and by the way, Durbin didn't slander the military, he suggested that an FBI agent's report on treatment of prisoners sounded like something from a horrible totalitarian regime, not America. Assertions that this somehow slanders the military are particularly absurd from someone who, in the next breath, claims that Rove wasn't slandering Democrats. Does Mehlman actually understand what the word "slander" means?)