WaPo Highlights GOP-as-Taliban Gaffe on Front Page

Monday’s Washington Post has a story on the resurgent Republicans by Alec MacGillis and Perry Bacon Jr. The home-page headline was "GOP as an Insurgent Opposition." It puts an off-putting GOP gaffe on the front page: "Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) suggested last week that the party is learning from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban, and the GOP these days does have the bravado of an insurgent band that has pulled together after a big defeat to carry off a quick, if not particularly damaging, raid on the powers that be."

Sessions said what? The liberal Democrats at the Think Progress blog leaped on this interview with National Journal’s Hotline last week:

"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that’s not what we’re saying.

I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."

Comparing Republicans to terrorist enablers? That's not a helpful analogy. Other than highlighting the statement, the Post simply moved on to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin expressing optimism: "We’re so far ahead of where we thought we’d be at this time...It’s a sign that we’re beginning to find our voice. We’re standing on our core principles, and the core principle that suffered most in recent years was fiscal conservatism and economic liberty."

Inside the paper, the Post put a large and dated picture of Rush Limbaugh, explaining in the caption how he’s "taken on a leadership role in the out-of-power Republican Party." The picture also led off the online article.

MacGillis and Bacon suggested the party is "focusing the stimulus critique on relatively small slivers of the package that echo old culture wars, such as spending for contraceptives and for the National Endowment for the Arts. And it means rallying to Rush Limbaugh, who has put himself forward as a de facto party leader, penning an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal and accepting the on-air apologies of Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), who criticized the radio host and paid for it in a deluge of angry calls."

As long as they were taking the time (probably wincing throughout) at covering the conservatives, it would have been better if the Post showed any sign they had actually listened to Limbaugh and quoted what he was saying on the air about Obama and the Democrats.