How Republicans Think in One Easy Lesson:
Sometimes you need a simple story, a fable, even, to understand something much larger. You need it to understand the template for more complex and more expansive ideas. Follow the bouncing ball of inanity here, for it is an uncomplicated story that explains all you need to know about how Republicans envision their role in the political process:

In Staten Island, New York - aka "The Last Reliably Republican (White) Borough" - incumbent GOP Congressman Michael Grimm is running against Democrat Mark Murphy. The kindest thing you could say about Grimm is that he's a bit better than New York Rep. Peter "Muslims Is Everywhere" King, although Grimm pretty much gargles King's balls. Anyways, this isn't about Grimm's voting record. It's about politics and parties and opportunism writ small.

This past Sunday night, someone vandalized the campaign office of Rep. Grimm by smashing in its large windows (Grimm HQ is in a former car dealership). Grimm told the Staten Island Advance newspaper that whoever broke the windows also erased the hard drives on the computers by installing Linux on them: "All of my polling data, all of the data from my IDs of voters, and a bunch of other campaign information. But fortunately we had everything backed up from literally hours before, so we don't lose anything because we have backups."

Grimm went into full victim mode. "This is an attack against a federal campaign office, which is an attack on our democracy as a whole. It's an attack against what we stand for, for free elections," he said. Further, "You know, especially in light of what happened with Gabby Giffords, we're not in the world today where we can shrug things off." Yes, that's right. Rep. Grimm compared the smashing of his office windows to the attempted murder of Gabby Giffords. Calm down, Mary.

But Grimm wasn't done crying political foul. His campaign issued a statement that read, in part, "[W]e have never seen an attack on a campaign escalate to this level...I do believe this is a politically motivated crime." The statement also said that the broken windows were a cover-up for the hard drive corruptions.

Or, in other words, the Democrats did it. They're to blame, of course.

Almost immediately, though, the story started to fall apart. One law enforcement official told the New York Times that the computers were fine, actually. Another told the Post that the whole thing didn't make sense. Why not just steal the computers if you're gonna bother breaking the windows?

And it's because it doesn't make sense. And that's because it was a random act of vandalism by a couple of teenagers who thought they were breaking the windows at an abandoned building in the middle of the night. It was not, as Grimm, ever the drama queen, said, "a crime against the government." Nope, it was a 14 and a 16 year-old. To compare their misdemeanor to the attack on Giffords is like saying that a mosquito bite is the same as a bear attack.

Now what does this Chicken Little story tell us? Notice that Grimm didn't wait for any more information from the cops to leap into blaming politics. It's like when Mitt Romney didn't wait to get more information before opening his yap about the U.S. embassy protests in Egypt. More to the point, ain't this shit just par for the course for Republicans? There's some problem, something is all fucked up, and instead of trying to figure out what the hell to do, they just instantly blame Democrats. Rather than reason out some solution, it's just a fuck of a lot easier to say it's those sons of bitches ruining the country and they need to be stopped.

And the kicker to this story is just awesome. For, just as Republicans use blaming Democrats as a way to distract from how much they are responsible for the nation's woes, Rep. Grimm is under investigation by federal prosecutors for accepting illegal campaign donations.

Which makes one wonder what might have been on those hard drives that needed erasing, no? Or is that engaging in baseless accusations, like, you know, the GOP?