They've got nothing.
A budget with no numbers. A party that is literally shrinking every day. Talking points that no one cares about. A campaign gimmick that was largely viewed as a horrible, and horribly funny, joke.
And now they're just making things up.
Marking Barack Obama's 100th day in office, the Republican National Committee published a video that uses an Obama impersonator to mock the president as beholden to a teleprompter and a hypocrite on a range of policy issues.
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The early, unreleased version of the video shows the faux-president pledging to increase spending and hand the census over to ACORN, as well as celebrating a Treasury Secretary who failed to pay his taxes. There is even a shot at Obama for his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, with the president thanking "Professor Ayers" for clapping after he pledged to put together "a report that characterizes our returning service members... as people who may become terrorists."
It doesn't matter that President Obama never pledged to increase spending and hand the census over to ACORN. They can just have their Obama impersonator pretend he did.
It doesn't matter that Obama never thanked Bill Ayers. Their impersonator can just pretend he did.
Apparently, the RNC hasn't figured out that Americans are sick and fucking tired of them making things up -- fixing the facts, if you will -- when things don't go their way.
No connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda? We'll just torture the hell out of whoever we can get our hands on until they say there is.
No WMD in Iraq? We'll just write up a phony memo that says there are.
No victory in Iraq yet? We'll just make a banner and dress up the president in a flight suit and say "Mission Accomplished."
No qualified Republican in the entire country who is willing to run on McCain's loser ticket? We'll just give Sarah Palin a Nieman Marcus make-over, some handy talking points from Wikipedia, and pretend she isn't a flaming idiot.
And now...
Now the president is still, even after 100 days, ridiculously popular. And so is his wife. And no one cares about gay marriage anymore. And no one cares whose hand the president shakes. And no one believes that by increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, we're doomed to a horrible sort of socialist dictatorship, where Joe the Plumber isn't free to go on all the talk shows he wants to tell people that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
So now they have to make it up. Hire an actor (this guy's black, right?) and put words in his mouth and pretend the president said stuff he never said.
It's not going to work. It won't be any more successful than the Republican Teabagging, or Rush praying for the president to fail, or all the hand-wringing about the president's ability to multi-task and not choke on a pretzel.
That last 20 percent of Americans who are not too completely humiliated to admit they are Republicans already believe the bullshit. A new fake video won't persuade them of anything they don't already believe (including the ridiculous idea that Stephen Colbert is on their side).
And while Michael Steele can't make up his mind whether he's pro-choice or anti-choice or whether gay marriage is a choice or a sin or whether the Republicans are blameless for everything or maybe a little responsible for the entire economic clusterfuck our president is now trying to fix, the organization of which he is supposedly in charge is continuing to spiral out of control and into oblivion.
So fine. Have it your way, RNC. Make up your lies and pretend they're the truth. Make your fake little videos. We don't even have to try to flip your senators, win your seats, or convince your party loyalists, one by one, that you've got nothing. You're doing it all by yourself.