Power Tool
by digby
I think we all know that Chris Matthews is a strange fellow. And he often sounds a little bit less than with it. But this really takes the cake. He seems to think that he’s figured out the secret GOP strategy for the fall:
MATTHEWS: …I’ve been thinking now for a couple of days now at least that what the Democrats are going to face this fall, what the Republicans are probably going to throw at them is, “You think we’re bad, we got a guy named Safavian you never heard of and we got this guy DeLay. He’s gone now. And we’re no day at the beach, but look what they’ve got. They’ve got a bunch of crazy guys who are going to try to lynch the president. They are going to try to censure him, but ideally they are going to try to impeach him. They are going to use the subpoena power to go crazy. Don’t let John Conyers of Michigan” —
Doesn’t it sound like he believes that he came up with this himself? And yet:
WASHINGTON, March 15 – Republicans, worried that their conservative base lacks motivation to turn out for the fall elections, have found a new rallying cry in the dreams of liberals about censuring or impeaching President Bush.
The proposal this week by Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, to censure Mr. Bush over his domestic eavesdropping program cheered the left. But it also dovetailed with conservatives’ plans to harness such attacks to their own ends.
With the Republican base demoralized by continued growth in government spending, undiminished violence in Iraq and intramural disputes over immigration, some conservative leaders had already begun rallying their supporters with speculation about a Democratic rebuke to the president even before Mr. Feingold made his proposal.
“Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now,” Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.
The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party’s demoralized base to go to the polls. With “impeachment on the horizon,” he wrote, “maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all.”
There goes Matthews, repeating this as if he thought it up all by himself. And in the process, of course, getting the theme out there on behalf of the Republicans.
