Ashley, Alison, And The Turtle Part 6

As I covered in last night's Last Call, Progress Kentucky has shaped up to be just about Mitch McConnell's best weapon in defusing the primary charge against him from the right, and completely disarming Kentucky Democrats on the left.  I'm glad I'm not the only one out there who thinks these clowns need to exit the stage as quickly as possible.  Evan McMorris-Santoro and Ruby Cramer bring us the epitaph:

It's probably possible for a political group to be worse at accomplishing its core mission than Progress Kentucky is, but it's difficult to imagine how.

In its short lifespan, the super PAC focused solely on defeating Sen. Mitch McConnell has instead helped the Republican incumbent deflect his low approval rating and conservative critics by subjecting McConnell to comically incompetent political attacks.

"They've managed to become McConnell's favorite whipping boy," said Jimmy Cauley, a longtime Kentucky Democratic strategist. "It's kind of laughable because they didn't exist four months ago. And yet they've gotten wrapped up in a string of four or five controversies."

Kentucky Democrats aren't ready to say Progress Kentucky has helped McConnell, but national Democratic observers have their jaws on the floor as they watch the group turn McConnell into a sympathetic figure, generating good headlines for him time and again. 

And that's the real damage done, these idiots have managed to make one of the most personally vile and villainous scumbags in Congress into the aggrieved victim, despite McConnell's awful, misogynist attacks on Ashley Judd and his atrocious voting record, all while he's managed to use his office to enrich himself by tens of millions of dollars.  The story should be how vulnerable, ineffective, and terrible McConnell is.  Instead, these two pudknockers have collapsed the circus tent and are running around setting bits of it on fire.

If the leakers of the tape wanted it to hurt McConnell, their plan backfired. McConnell raised money off his claim that he had been the victim of "Nixonian" tactics, and generally fomented conservative support with his outrage-based spin strategy after the tape came to light. Now that it looks like McConnell might be proven right about the origins of the tape, it's likely he'll get even more mileage out of Progress Kentucky.

The longer Progress Kentucky is in the news, the less McConnell's record is.  Kentucky Democrats are already a lost cause for most Americans.  If the rest of the Dems across the nation throw in the towel on beating Mitch because Heckle and Jeckle here have made the KY Dem brand too toxic to help...

McConnell has real political problems, including low approval ratings and Tea Party types in the GOP who are less than thrilled with his leadership in the Senate. National Democrats fear that the repeated Progress Kentucky faceplants are letting McConnell coast along.

"If it was them, this is an idiotic move and something that could jeopardize the larger push against McConnell in '14," one senior Democratic strategist in D.C. said of the tape. "If this is true, you ask yourself, why anybody would risk such a maneuver, especially on a tape was damning but not a game changer?"

In fact, Progress Kentucky is so bad at its stated task that some Democrats whisper behind the scenes (a better word is "hope") that it must to be a front set up by McConnell to make him look good and Democrats look terrible. Jennings had a message for those Democrats: no such luck.

"That's wishful thinking on the part of Democrats, I am sure, who seriously want to be as far away from these people as possible," he said.

Gives me a headache just thinking about it.