Our Two Principal Weapons Are “Fear;” “Extreme Negative Feelings Toward Existing Administration” and “Reactionary.” No, Our Three ...

Eric Alterman, among others, weighs in on the Republican National Committee's "Fun in Fundraising" presentation.

In many ways, the document is a parody of what liberals think conservatives are actually like.

Whatever. No surprise that Republican fund-raisers are especially cynical assholes. They may well have been self-satirizing.

A little more important:

The document raises a number of issues with regard to the media coverage Republicans have been earning of late. For instance, while Politico’s Ben Smith deserves kudos for breaking the story, what the hell are we to make of this piece that ran just last week by Kenneth Vogel in the same publication, as well as this one in the Los Angeles Times? Both take the tack—based on the skimpiest of evidence that moderates are actually in the process of taking the Republican Party back from the people building bunkers and demanding birth certificates. "I'm very optimistic the elections this year are going to bring back a resurgence of the center,” says Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, duly and respectfully reported by the L.A. Times’ Janet Hook. Sure it “seems paradoxical” to Hook, because absolutely everything the Republicans have said and done since losing the 2008 election belies this, but what the hell? And Tom Tancredo’s shockingly racist Tea Party speech calling for literacy tests and condemning the election of "Barack Hussein Obama” was not, according to Vogel, “widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media,” but why allow so wonderfully contrarian a trend to be weighed down by a lack of evidence?

In a nod to the need for mindless objectivity, Smith asserts in his story on the memo that “Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms” to those presented by the Republican memo, but presents not a shred of evidence for it. Here again, he would be hard-pressed to do so. But the reality of this revelation is so far beyond any precedent for official party fundraising practices before it, even the reporter who unearths it feels a need to minimize just how far beyond the political pale it reaches.

Ironically, this memo might present Democrats with just the kick in the ass they so desperately need. This is the party demanding compromise and bipartisanship? These are the votes they’re chasing? Perhaps instead, they’d decide it’s time to fight fire with fire….

Holding our breath, as usual.