DICK MORRIS REDUX

Dick Morris helped Bill Clinton stage a comeback after the '94 midterm elections, but Morris fell, or was pushed, when it was revealed a few months before the '96 election that he'd been visiting a hooker. within short order, the right wing flipped him, and he became a scourge of Democrats on Fox News, in online wingnut periodicals, and in a series of hastily written books, which seem to come out at the rate of several a year.

Eric Massa seems to be heading in the same direction. I don't know whether or not he's genuinely guilty of thoroughly unacceptable sexual conduct, but his notion of where blame should be placed for his downfall sure seems to have changed a hell of a lot since last Friday -- in a conveniently pro-GOP direction -- as Time's Jay Newton-Small notes:

Gone is the contrite politician who said in an open letter Friday on his website, "I own this reality... My difficulties are of my own making. Period."

Apparently, Massa now believes his difficulties are of the making of the Democratic leadership. In his weekly WKPQ radio blog on Sunday he lambasted House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer for informing reporters of the ethics case, about which Massa says he wasn't even aware....

And, of course, he's called Rahm Emanuel "son of the devil's spawn" and "an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote."

And if that wasn't punchy enough, a guy no one outside his district had ever heard of until last week also unloaded another pitch-perfect (and Drudge-perfect) soundbite:

"I was set up for this from the very, very beginning," he added. "The leadership of the Democratic Party have become exactly what they said they were running against."

(And I almost forgot the story about the angry encounter with Emanuel in the shower.)

So Massa's the new Morris -- the new wingnut Whittaker Chambers, an apostate hero to Drudge and Fox Nation -- and what do you know, he's going to be on Glenn Beck's radio show for a full hour tomorrow.

The vast right-wing conspiracy doesn't let opportunities like this get away. Talk about not letting a crisis go to waste. Talk about always being ready with an anvil when your political enemy takes on any amount of water.