Isn't it always so touching when Republicans are concerned about the Democratic Party's behavior?
In his final days, [Kennedy] focused on a narrow political goal, pleading with state leaders to change state law to posthumously fill his Senate seat with an interim appointee who would be a vote in favor of the health care legislation he championed.
So his allies on the left have made no secret of their hopes that his legacy will serve to bolster the uncertain health reform plan, with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) even suggesting the bill be named for Kennedy.
And that has some influential conservative voices sounding the alarm and calling foul.
Because it would be unthinkable...unthinkable...for such a thing to happen:
Republicans see the events surrounding Reagan's death, coming at the end of a week in which Bush will have been visible on the world stage, as providing a potential circuit breaker from two months of unrelenting bad news in Iraq that has driven down Bush's approval ratings and raised Democratic hopes for victory. They also believe that Reagan's death will remind Americans of the effect of strong, if sometimes controversial, presidential leadership built on conservative convictions.
Their anticipation is that the week's events will give Bush an opportunity to steady himself politically and assert his leadership in a time of national mourning for Reagan and collective commemoration of one of the most stirring events in U.S. history, the storming of the Normandy beaches in 1944.
The idea that the passing of a political legend might have residual effects in the political sphere is not surprising nor particularly unsavory, despite the Republicans' crocodile tears to the contrary.
Heck, when President Reagan passed a little over six years ago, the "true conservatives" over at the Club for Growth created a combination pro-Bush/anti-Kerry advertisement invoking both Reagan and 9/11 (the actual L.A. Times article on the story is subscription-only, but if you want to plunk down the $3.95, here you go). They rushed the ad so soon after Reagan's passing that Nancy Reagan actually complained, and the ad was pushed back several days. Less than two weeks after his father's passing, Ronald Reagan Jr. blasted the GOP for using Reagan's legacy to sell the Iraq War:
"I would observe that my father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody else's mantle. He never felt the need to pretend to be anybody else...This is their administration. This is their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, well, they're no Ronald Reagans, that's for sure," he fumed.
So, to review: within a couple of days of Reagan's passing, GOP operatives were crowing to newspapers about the political upside for George W. Bush. Within two weeks, Republican allies already had an ad in the can that invoked the deceased in order to attack the Democratic nominee and boost the Republican incumbent.
Keep both of those things in mind over the next few days, as the inevitable bleating takes place.
The faux outrage of the Republican Party on this issue is as transparent as it is asinine.