An old lawyer saying counsels counselors to bang on the law if they don’t have good facts, to bang on the facts if they don’t have good law and to bang on the table if they have neither good law nor good facts.
Senator Mike Lee is an old lawyer, trying to defend Gov. Mitt Romney’s pick of Gov. Mike Leavitt to head his White House transition team should he be elected president in November. And Senator Lee is definitely banging on the table.
Asked last week to explain how a man who spent the last couple of years making a fortune encouraging states to implement ObamaCare on the flimsy (and incorrect) reasoning that “local control” is an option under the law is now going to help lead the way on dismantling it, Sen. Lee turned to the famous straw man argument.
Lee dismissed worries about the fact that Leavitt was profiting from the implementation of President Obama’s health care law.“If the rule were, you cannot be considered a conservative, or even palatable to any conservatives under any circumstances if you have operated in or especially made a profit in any area that isn’t 100 percent governed by free market, no one would qualify,” Lee said. “The truth is there are so many things, especially in the post-Obamacare world, where the market isn’t really free.”
Please. We aren’t talking about judging Gov. Leavitt a conservative or even talking at all about government-supported profit, much less demanding a complete absence of it. We are talking about measuring Leavitt’s credibility in the role of bolstering the already shaky credibility of a Republican nominee on the top issue that gives would-be supporters pause.
Banging on the table at a moment like this serves only to hold Romney back in a race he should be walking away with.
Red State has already asked nicely once.
