Max Baucus vs. Adult Beverages: Round Two

The recently released YouTube video of Sen. Max Baucus' (D-MT) unexpurgated, C-Span recorded anti-Republican rant continues to elicit interpretations and comments galore all over the Internet. Baucus is attempting to defend the Senate version of the current, disastrous, inaptly-named "Obamacare" bill via the usual route--blaming the Republicans for voting en mass against a socialistic  bill containing an order of magnitude more political payoffs than it does healthcare reform.

Problem is, Baucus is quite obviously slurring and stammering away in the video. To anyone with an ounce of sense, there's quite obviously something wrong with this dude besides sheer ineptitude. Like a true Democrat, however, Baucus (or, more correctly, his staff) fights back against the inevitable conclusion, according to the Billings (Montana) Gazette, by blaming everyone else:

Max Baucus' office Monday denounced a widely viewed Internet video that suggested Baucus was drunk on the Senate floor last week, calling it an "untrue, personal smear" designed to attack Democrats’ health-care reform legislation.

"This is beyond the pale, and this type of gutter politics has no place in the public sphere," said Baucus spokesman Ty Matsdorf.

Give me a break. Just link back to the video (we posted it here) and listen again. Baucus' staffers are in collective denial. Granted, an imbalance of prescription drugs can sometimes cause this kind of verbal behavior as it did many years ago in an incident involving the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. So could a stroke. But in the video, the Senator clearly is suffering no outward signs of a stroke. And his staffers haven't (yet) launched a prescription drug defense. So what's left, hmmm?

More pathetic is the staffers' lame "slander" defense. I don't recall any similar outrage during the 8 years of nonstop partisan slander that characterized the Democrats' behavior during the George W. Bush administration. Cry me a river.

Even more unvelievable is the scandalous editorializing of Billings Gazette scribe, Mike Dennison, who shamelessly asserts the following:

Baucus, whose public speaking style can be halting and awkward, is not slurring his words, but sometimes repeats himself during the five-minute video.

Not slurring?? Just watch and listen to the video. Then read Dennison's sentence again. This is why the media has lost its once vice-like grip on public opinion. Ironically, the Gazette actually provides the C-Span video link, which makes Dennison's shameless lying all the more amazing.

Cap this off with the Senator's concurrent scandal in which he was caught attempting to catapult his mistress into a plum Federal position for which she is demonstrably not qualified. The press isn't bothering with this one much either. Left-wing bias, anyone? HazZzMat reports. You decide.