Even The Mind-Numbingly Dumb Talking Points Are Wrong

If you've been listening to much of the health care debate in Washington lately, it would be hard to miss complaints from Republicans about how the complicated health care bill happens to be pretty long when it's printed with big type and double spaced. 

It's a pathetic argument -- big pieces of legislation often have many pages (e.g. No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, etc.) -- but as the AP writes today, the GOP spinmeisters have even messed this up:

Republicans love to get their hands on the Democrats' health care legislation. They show it to the cameras at every opportunity, even piling one version on top of another to make a big pile look even bigger...

"Exceeding even 'War and Peace' in length," Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said of the House bill...

Actually, Leo Tolstoy's tome is longer than either bill. Full translated versions are nearly twice as long.

The bill passed by the House is 319,145 words. The Senate bill is 318,512 words, shorter than the House version despite consuming more paper. Various versions of Tolstoy's novel are 560,000 to 670,000 words. Bush's education act tallied more than 280,000 words.

By now, the full draft of Reid's bill that had circulated in the corridors and landed so prominently on Republican desks has been published in the Congressional Record in the official and conventional manner.

The type is small and tight. No hernias will be caused by moving this rendering of the bill around. Unfurling it on the Capitol steps would not be much of a spectacle.

It's 209 pages.

What makes this argument from Blunt all the more incredible is its outrageous hypocrisy.  In November 2003, just days before the infamous vote on the Medicare prescription drug benefit legislation (read more about it here) Blunt flatly told a reporter that he had no intention of allowing his members to read a bill roughly half the size this year's health care bill:

"We're going to be working hard with them to answer their questions. We don't expect any of them to have a chance to read a 1,100-page bill."

Imagine how the interwebs would explode if Nancy Pelosi made a statement like this in 2009.