You know what’s even more fun than mocking Rick Santelli? Mocking Karl Rove! And true to form, Jonathan Chait gives the Boy Genius a working-over as effective as any I’ve seen since the Fox News 2012 election night debacle.
Rove penned a column aimed at talking Republicans back into a more aggressive posture towards Obamacare, an issue that has astoundingly fallen off the radar screen in some precincts of the GOP. Chait calmy bats down Rove’s pedestrian talking points about Obamacare’s horrendous unpopularity, and then goes for the kill:
Rove’s column goes on, and on, and on about the horrible things he imagines Obamacare has done to America. Finally, we arrive at these two paragraphs:
“Putting ObamaCare in the center of their campaigns will also force GOP candidates to spell out what they would do instead of ObamaCare. Americans do not want to return to the broken status quo in place before Mr. Obama made an even bigger mess of our health-care system.”
“ObamaCare was unpopular when it passed. Republican candidates must show through real-life examples why those concerns were fully justified, and how millions of lives have been unnecessarily disrupted by this liberal calamity.”
Republicans need to spell out what we would do instea — oh, look, I’ve run out of space.
This is especially hilarious to anyone who has ever written space-specific columns. Some people have a knack for knowing how to frame a column so that it fits the word-limit, and some don’t. And some, like Rove, just seem to cut off the meter when the time’s up, whether they’ve made a cogent argument or not.
