A Horrible Week For The GOP

You just have to think that all of the far-right-wing Republicans -- namely, 98% of the current GOP -- are pretty depressed this week. First of all, you have the whole 50th anniversary of the March on Washington debacle -- not a single prominent Republican attended. How did the GOP defend this massive fuck-up on its part? Well, by expressing outrage, of course -- outrage that no Republicans were invited to this event.

That turned out to be false -- shitloads of Republicans were invited.  Every single one of them turned down the invitation, however, which is understandable, given that there isn't a prominent Republican in this country who would allow himself to be photographed at an event commemorating, among other things, the 50th anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Fox News did its best to push this "no Republicans were invited" horseshit earlier in the week, but that effort fell apart, culminating in a very rare on-air apology by Mr. O'Lie-lly himself:

Bill O'Reilly apologized Thursday night for his erroneous comments about the 50th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington the previous day.  O'Reilly had complained that no Republicans had been invited to the event. In fact, many, including both living Republican presidents, John McCain, Jeb Bush and John Boehner had been asked to attend. All declined for various reasons. O'Reilly admitted that he had been wrong.

"The mistake? Entirely on me," he said. "I simply assumed ... Republicans were excluded."  He advised viewers to "always check out the facts when you make a definitive statement, and added that he was "sorry I made that mistake."

The GOP's last hope was to push the notion that the Senate's only black lawmaker -- Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) -- wasn't invited, but that was also false. Senator Scott, it turned out, declined an invitation as well. I'm still waiting for Fox News to do the right thing on this, i.e., criticize Republicans for not showing up at this event.  I have a feeling that will be a long wait.

The GOP's bad week also included problems for the Heritage Foundation, the right wing group that -- ironically -- first came up with the idea of the individual health care mandate, the centerpiece for ObamaCare.  Here is Steve Benen's take on what happened:

The Kaiser Family Foundation published an interesting report this week on public attitudes on health care, noting among other things that 57% of Americans do not want to defund the Affordable Care Act. This was, of course, not what Republicans and their allies wanted to hear.

The Heritage Foundation was apparently so despondent with the findings that it lost its reading-comprehension skills -- the right-wing group unveiled a poster on Wednesday, asking folks to join the 57% of Americans who do want to defund "Obamacare." When Heritage was told it simply read the poll wrong, and got the results backwards, the organization made the same mistake again.

The Heritage Foundation was also banned this week from meetings of the Republican Study Committee, a group of 172 conservative Congressmen.

Things really turned to shit for the GOP yesterday.  Once again, here is Steve Benen to sum it all up:

The Obama administration's Department of Health and Human Services *** announced it will now extend key Medicare benefits to same-sex married couples. Soon after, the Justice Department cleared the way for Colorado's and Washington's marijuana laws to be implemented.

Also today, the White House announced new gun policies on background checks and the re-importation of U.S. military weapons; a California court endorsed a ban on so-called "conversion therapy"; and in case social conservatives weren't quite miserable enough, the IRS will now recognize same-sex marriages, even in states where marriage equality is impermissible.

I'm willing to bet that Republicans are more depressed now than they were on the day President Obama killed bin Laden. Yes, this last week was really that awful for them.