August 27, 2009 07:08 PM UTC

How It Gets Spun

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• by: Colorado Pols

Editor’s note: as this story has developed over the last couple of days, it’s become clear that all parties, beginning with Denver Police, have been improperly identifying the alleged perpetrator. The suspect uses the name Ariel Attack, and her gender identification has been misreported. We’re reminded of the recent successful hate crime prosecution by GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck after the murder of a transsexual woman, and would ask everyone to please be respectful of this correction.

Yesterday, we showed you talking points being circulated by the Heritage Foundation about the recent vandalism of Colorado Democratic Party headquarters, subsequently reported to have been committed by “Queers Against Obama” anarchists. To recap, the spin from Heritage Foundation was that the person arrested was actually someone tangentially referred to in news reports as “handling the books” for a Democratic-aligned 527–in other words, total fiction, describing a completely different person, emailed to hundreds of thousands of conservative activists. But fiction with a easily identifiable purpose.

It’s pretty clear at this point that the real danger to Democrats from this story looms not from the actual facts, which appear to indicate a bizarre case of sincere violence against Democrats from their left. No, the problem is very much the willful distortion of the facts as the story plays telephone from one band of right-wing activists to the next. This thing’s no good to the GOP if it’s just some anarchist rock-thrower with their own motives, after all–it’s got to be a setup.

Cue Fox News.

State GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams told FOXNews.com he was “stunned” by comments made by Democratic Party Chairwoman Pat Waak following the smashing of 11 windows at the Democratic headquarters early Tuesday morning.

Waak told the Denver Post that the vandalism, allegedly carried out by a former Democratic canvasser who left behind an anti-health care reformer poster, was “an effort on the other side to stir up hate.” After learning about alleged vandal’s political past, Waak told the newspaper that “there is a lot of rhetoric out there from both sides of the spectrum.”

“I was stunned by [Waak] actually suggesting the act of vandalism had something to do with opposition to Obama’s health care reform,” Wadhams told FOXNews.com Wednesday. “That is unfair and inappropriate to say that anybody who opposes Obama’s health care plan is somehow responsible for this despicable act of vandalism.”

And here’s the problem: despite the fact that the initial suspicion right-wingers might have been responsible for this isn’t stunning in the least after the August we’ve all just lived through, despite Fox News making no attempt whatsoever to report the full story, conveniently stopping right after the words “canvassed for a 527” with apparently no need to mention any of the “Queers Against Obama” anarchist stuff that actually explains what happened–despite all of this, Wadhams is right about one simple thing: it wasn’t a Republican who did it, and Pat Waak initially implied otherwise.

That’s all you need, once you omit all the inconvenient parts of the story, to throw the Democrats under the bus in every conservative-friendly media delivery system there is.

And frankly? The Republicans might win this one. The spin is sexier politically than the facts. It’s a win that, as we’ve explained, can only be fully exploited dishonestly–but that is obviously what is happening, no compunction anywhere in sight. This story, in our opinion, stands to do significant damage to the narrative Democrats have been building throughout this August recess of belligerent right-wing crazies shouting down (or worse) rational debate over health care reform. Every time that’s mentioned around the dinner table in Middle America now, somebody will bring up the “Democrat staffer who vandalized their own office and tried to blame Republicans,” and that is a disaster for the underlying, almost-forgotten issue we started the month talking about.

UPDATE: Think we’re kidding?