Planned Parenthood and the Art of Charts

Dear Reince:

As chairman of the Republican National Committee it must have been a rough day for you in front of the Priebus’ man cave big screen watching your boys and girls at that House committee going after Planned Parenthood. It wasn’t even buried on C-Span. It was carried on all the cable news outlets and was fodder for all the network news broadcasts. You must have felt as happy to come to work today as the Mayor of Kunduz.

I was thinking about you especially when your star Jason Chaffetz, you know that shrill guy who always sounds like he’s off his meds, the Robin to Darrel Issa’s Batman, certainly took it in the shorts when he tried to spear PP chief Cecile Richards with that disingenuous, phoney baloney chart. He really should have used some white out to cover the name of the right wing group that gave it to Chaffetz (the x-y grid didn’t even make sense) before he tried to convince people it was “Congressional” data. Too bad for him one of Richards’ attorneys figured it out and she was able to wipe the smirk off Chaffetz’ face with revelation of the obvious deception. Now that moment alone was worth popping some popcorn and pulling up the LazyBoy for an epic Congressional ‘fail’ show. (In case you missed it, Reince, I’ll send along a couple of screen grabs from Rachel Maddow’s show — with Chaffetz’ chart issues helpfully annotated.

I suppose the hearing was simply a lighter moment in the GOP 2016 efforts. No matter how big a debacle it was — and what’s with Trey Gowdy giving that creepy wink to Ms. Richards? — it’s no match for your daily grind of keeping tabs on the clown car that keeps rolling on — boy do I miss Rick Perry, Scott Walker and, and, and, who was the third one… oops.

Anyway, I feel bad for you having to deal with an out of the blue, insurgent billionaire telling you to piss up a rope every time you suggest he stop eating the presidential wanna-be youngsters. (Pssst… he really is working with Bill Clinton, ya know). As if it wasn’t bad enough for Dick Cheney to shoot his buddy in the face, now you have Congressional Republicans shooting themselves in the face. At the rate your candidates are sliming each other as “losers” and claiming each other “don’t have a clue,” and Congressional Republicans continue to flog anything that looks pink, your team is likely to see the White House only from their LazyBoys on the big screen at the end of the parade on January 20, 2017.

Best wishes to you and Sally.

Your most humble lurker,

Patrick

p.s. We’ll hold off on the Boehner thing and the government shut down thing. I’m sure that’s just a little too much indigestion.