LIBERALS, PLEASE DON'T IMAGINE THAT THIS WILL HURT JAN BREWER

Steve Benen and John Cole understand, but I hope the rest of you realize that Jan Brewer's opening statement in last night's Arizona gubernatorial debate, with its endless deer-in-the-headlights pause (about 36 seconds in), is absolutely not going to hurt her chances of victory, and may actually help her:




Even as we speak, teams of video librarians, at Fox News and at wingnut-welfare outposts across America, are scouring every on-camera appearance by a Democratic politician since the invention of the cathode-ray tube, if not since the Lumiere brothers, in order to find pauses, stumbles, and verbal gaffes that will dwarf this one. They'll find some, and they'll show up all over the right-o-sphere in the next few days.

Simultaneously, right-wing pundits, bloggers, and pols will get to work memorizing and regurgitating their assigned talking points, which will probably be some variation on "Yeah, Barack Obama talks real slick, and look what a mess he's made. Jan Brewer isn't an East Coast Ivy League rootless cosmopolitan elitist -- she's a real person, and a real American, not like Slick Barry."

Or maybe just: "Well, but you have to remember one thing -- she wasn't allowed to use ... A TELEPROMPTER! HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!!"

All this will be woven into larger indictments of left-wing perfidy -- oh, how the liberals mock Sarah Palin when she looks at her hand! They don't like imperfection -- that's why they want Down syndrome babies aborted!

They're going to flood the zone. They're going to smother this. So don't get your hopes up that it will even put a small dent in Brewer's armor.

*****

UPDATE: And so it begins. Headline at Left Coast Rebel:

BREAKING: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is a Real Person, Ben Smith a Sexist?

(Smith, over at Politico, had the temerity to blog about this. Sexist? Yeah -- Smith is so sexist he's Written three posts in the last two days criticizing Vanity Fair's Sarah Palin story.)

More from LCR:

Maybe the left, and Ben Smith just hate Jan Brewer because she is a woman and a conservative? That, my friends is the sexism of the left.

Right, I almost forgot about that bit of boilerplate -- we're the true sexists (we attack Sarah and Jan!), just as we're the real racists (we keep blacks on the "liberal plantation"!)