If You Want To Make Lemonade, You Need Lemons

We've expounded previously on our lack of bona fides as political scientists, specifically on our inability to grasp the obviously subtle and convoluted strategy behind the republican attempt to remove itself from the vote getting business, but it seems they're quite serious about pursuing this course of action. Not only have they formed a committee of the people no one wants for president to remind them how to lose elections, now they gone and signed up the very people who got them in this mess in the first place as advisers.

Here's some free advice from your friends at Ironicus Maximus World Headquarters folks: Winning elections is about increasing your vote totals, not shrinking them. This is not golf. The lowest score does not win. Sorry to be so blunt, but you seem unclear on the concept.

Republicans looking to recover from Bush-era defeats are turning to an unlikely source for advice: top aides to former President George W. Bush. See, here is your problem. As our sainted mother used to say, this is like taking swimming lessons from a concrete block.

Former White House press secretart Dana Perino, former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie and former White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto are among those set to take money from House Republican press secretaries at their annual workshop. Wait. Now that we think about it, this could work. After all, if you want to learn how to drive the clown car, you have to ask the clowns.

GOP House Conference Communications Director Matt Lloyd said Perino, Gillespie and Fratto represented “the iron pyrite standard for Republican communications professionals” and were obvious choices to advise the party’s messengers. "Well, that and the fact that no one else would return our phone calls."

The Bush vets say their turbulent White House years make them uniquely suited to advise a House Republican Conference stuck in a nearly 80-seat minority.“We are battle-tested,” said Perino, who was Bush’s last press secretart. "Of course we lost the battle. And the war. Come to think of it, it would have probably gone better if we hadn't even showed up, but what the heck, I'll take any paycheck I can find these days."

Fratto, who spent three years as Bush’s deputy press secretary, cited his experience being in an actual duel of wits with Congress. "Of course it would have gone better if I had brought some wits to the duel, but those are the things you learn along the way."

GOP House Conference Communications Director Matt Lloyd called the workshop an integral part of the GOP’s renewed focus on communications. "Of course, the message we're communicating is as bat spit crazy as it's ever been, but you take one step at a time."

Perino said the intensified communications effort is paying off, and she offered particular praise for the conference’s repeated mantra TEA BAG!! TEA BAG!!!MUSLIM!!!BLARGH!!

“I think they’re improving, and they’re starting to get a sense of how to attack in the next 18 months ahead of 2010,” said Fratto.

Well, "attack" might be too strong of a word at this juncture, don't you think Mr. Fratto? Perhaps stand in a pool of your own urine and scream at the rest of the country to get off your lawn might be a tad more accurate. Oh, and don't forget your sign.


Because everybody knows and infromed democracy is a strong democracy.