By Brad Friedman on 9/2/2004, 2:37pm PT  

Is it not possible that the Republicans knew exactly what they were doing by allowing the angry and ugly Zell Miller to be their counterpoint keynote speaker to the Democrat's hopeful and positive Barack Obama?

No doubt, they knew full well the type of poison they could get Zell to throw into the water. Surely they vetted his speech before hand, and thus must have known how almost none of it would stand up factually to even the most tepid of journalistic scrutiny.

For proof of that, see CNN's interview with Zell after the speech last night, during which CNN took a short break from business-as-usual to become, if only momentarily, journalists again who managed to trash in only just a few minutes almost everything Zell was hoping to sell last night.

So if even CNN, of all media, would be able to debunk this clown in minutes, surely the Republicans must have understood that in advance and decided nonetheless that the effort would be worthwhile.

So why would they do it? We'll have to assume at this point that they are just happy to get the trash into the public domain where it'll be unexamined red meat to the Talk Radio Nation. And then, when the predictable and simple debunking occured among the literatti, the only person who'd stand to look like a jackass would be only be a Democrat after all.

Pretty cagey. Smells precisely like classic Rovian Machinations if ever there were any.

I think, however, that they may have been overly optimistic about Zell being the only one who might get stained in this devil's bargain. But only time will tell.

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