Cross-posted at Balloon Juice.
It's beyond doubt that Harry Reid basically pushed in Frist's nose yesterday. When that sort of thing happens, what do you do about it? Yesterday we saw four basic strategies.
more on the flip...
First,
whine about the mean guy who hit you:
"Never have I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution."
That shouldn't be the move of choice for a party whose image depends on projecting strength.
Alternatively, you can claim that you had planned to push in your nose yourself so the whole thing was unnecessary.
"Roberts angrily responded that his staff had been hard at work on the second phase of the investigation and had hoped to conclude that work next week - something he said that Democrats knew.
Pardon me for doubting Roberts's sincerity.
You could try threats. I know something that would really blow the Senate apart - Bush could nominate an extremist and then Frist could invoke the nuclear option! Wait...
Actually, it's not clear what the Republicans can threaten Reid with that they haven't in fact already done. Frist, in a second go at a credible response, has one idea:
"This is an affront to me personally. It's an affront to our leadership. It's an affront to the United States of America!" Turning sorrowful, he vowed that "for the next year and a half, I can't trust Senator Reid."
In a stunning revelation, Frist also announced that he will no longer let Barbara Boxer crib his math homework.
Sometimes it's best to merely pretend like nothing happened at all. In schoolyard terms, that's the smart move when it turns out that the quiet, scrawny kid who doesn't hang out with anybody has a brown belt in judo. He won't go around the school bragging about breaking your forearm and it's not like he goes out of his way to pick fights, so maybe in a while things will reset to the way they were before you pissed in his bookbag. Which, for my money, probably describes fairly well the way the Republicans feel about the Democrats right now.
Cue Fox:
CNN is all over Harry Reid's move to force the Senate into closed session. Half a dozen correspondents are talking about it, and Jack Cafferty just unleashed a broadside about the need to find out once and for all whether we were lied into war.
But I keep flipping over to Fox and they've got nothing. What's up with that? Isn't this their kind of story?
Here's the trouble with that strategy. If people saw that scrawny kid break your arm, your aura is busted and scrawny judo boy might start to grow a possee of his own. In that case the only way for alpha kid to set things right is to engineer some catastrophic, career-ending humiliation for the new guy. That is to say, Harry Reid. Watch your back, judo boy.
[Update] New title is cooler. You know it's true.