The GOP's Ministry of Truth

Authoritative and accurate!

GOPUSA is a Republican mouthpiece that maintains a website and issues an e-mail newsletter. The latest edition of the newsletter just popped into my in-box. It's a beaut. By assiduously sifting the vast amount of news and pseudo-news out there, GOPUSA can extract the bits and pieces necessary to assemble a political panorama that is more pleasant than reality (for Republicans, at least). This time the elephant pacifier carries the headline “Analyst Sees GOP Holding Onto House and Senate Next Month.” One immediately wonders: Who is the the source of this analysis and how accurate might he be?

Wonder no more. I've added a bit of emphasis to the first paragraph to highlight a tiny problem:

Analyst Sees GOP Holding Onto House and Senate Next Month

By Chad Groening
October 11, 2006

(AgapePress)—A conservative political pundit believes that, despite the Senator Mark Foley scandal and the efforts of the liberal media, the Republican Party will hold onto both houses of Congress in next month's elections.

Bill Lauderback, the Executive Vice-President of the American Conservative Union, says he has done an extensive analysis of the 2006 House and Senate races. At election time, he notes, “conservatives consistently turn out much better than liberal Democrats do,” which is one reason why he believes the GOP is unlikely to lose either chamber to the Democrats.

Still, the Lauderback does expect the Republicans will suffer some casualties. “We're going to lose some seats in the Senate,” he says. “And I'm afraid a very staunch conservative, Rick Santorum, may be defeated.” And that will be a shame, the political analyst adds, because he says Santorum is “a true beacon of conservative light in the United States Senate, and I hope he is able to pull his race out.”

But overall, Lauderback believes the Republicans will come out ahead in November. “At this juncture, going race by race and then counting it up,” he says, “I do not have the House nor the Senate being lost by the Republican Party.”

Specifically, the conservative pundit thinks the GOP is going to lose some moderate Republican seats in the House. “Perhaps if we had good, strong conservative candidates in those seats, we'd have a better chance of keeping them,” he says.

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Yeah, that's right. A reporter for AgapePress thinks that former U.S. Representative Mark Foley of Florida was a Senator. What's more, an official GOP publication is put together by people who don't know enough to correct the error before sending it out. As for the political analyst himself, Mr. Lauderback can identify only the troglodytic Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania as likely to lose. I presume then that he's confident about the campaigns of George Felix “Macaca” Allen, Conrad Burns, Mike DeWine, and Lincoln Chaffee. All of them are trailing in the polls, some by several percentage points. (Of course, Chaffee isn't a right-wing conservative, so perhaps he's considered expendable.)

I truly hope these folks are in charge of many GOP re-election campaigns. It could be a very good year for Democrats.

Update: Someone finally noticed, so the word “Senator” in the GOPUSA article has disappeared into the memory hole. Too late! The original gaffe remains in all the e-mails they sent out. (And what is with that weird gripping hand logo? Or is it the groping trunk of a prostrate elephant?)