You are listening to another episode of No Fair Remembering Stuff, the Tuesday edition of the Professional Left Podcast, and available wherever you get your podcasts, and at our website, pro-leftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast.

There is a Patreon button at our website, or you can mail us a letter and or a contribution at The Professional Left Podcast, Left Podcast, PL Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

And it's not safe for work. Today we're going to talk about a subject near and dear to our hearts.

Yes.

A scam that popped up in the wake of the collapse of the George W. Bush administration.

Now, we're not going to talk about the GOP rebranding scam commonly referred to by media elitists as the Tea Party.

We will definitely be devoting a future episode to that mess,

but today we're going to remember another equally sketchy rebranding scheme that ran

almost exactly parallel to the fake Tea Party. But first, let's set the scene. In 2006, the Bush

administration began to collapse. In November of that year, the Democrats would whip the Republicans in the midterms.

And the smell of something broken and rotten coming from the heart of the GOP hung in the air all year.

The news from Iraq was ominous and getting worse.

It was the year that George W. Bush went from praising Donald Rumsfeld as the greatest

Secretary of Defense in history shortly before the midterm elections to firing Rummy one

day after the election.

Yep.

Whoops.

This is from NBC News on November 8th, 2006.

Rumsfeld stepping down.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary on Wednesday one

day after midterm elections in which opposition to the war in Iraq contributed to heavy

Republican losses.

...