But they don't have to do very much to get the MSM to parrot the "Dems in disarray" narrative, so why be constrained by facts?

Bayh knows the reason for his current frustration: the total Republican obstructionism, but did not even have the guts to call it out on the way out the door. Bayh is a coward, and good riddance to him.

What Azelie said... just watch Faux nooze first. The other corporate news readers (I'm talkin' to you Wolf Blitzer)will pick up the meme and go with it - zero fact checking , just a headline. It must be great to spout any manner of shit and have no one call you on it except for a few blogs and some low rated cable TEEVEE shows.

My guess is that Steele knows perfectly well what the facts are. He also knows that many of those hearing about this comment don't. That's the crowd this statement is directed at and he couldn't care less about those of us who know that it's flat out wrong.

azelie hit the nail. Steele's comment was intended for Hardball, Halperin etc. I am surprised his statement wasn't more like - "after attempting to install death panels, bankrupting the country, and treating terrorists like shoplifters the Democrats are scared sh!tless ."

Maybe Steele's nasty rhetoric, calling Bayh a coward (which by the way he is) will get Bayh's dander up and give him enough balls to call Steele out on it. Nah. Bayh's a coward. Nauseating...

As much as I respect differences with Chris Matthews, he too will be saying the Democrats are running for the hills for all to hear on cable news. Fox, no less, will employ its echo chamber.
The true story here is that the Senate has become an intolerable workplace. All arrows point
to the obstructionist Republicans.

When you have an MSM that thinks the way to deal with a self-evident, objectively verifiable, incontestable lie by a Republican is to follow it with something like "Democrats, however, say that more Republicans than Democrats have chosen not to run," where's the incentive not to lie? The lie gets put onto an equal plane with the truth for the public and they, in turn, being the public, will reach the obvious inference that "the truth must be in the middle somewhere." Which is a win for the liars.

Steve,
It may be "easy" to fact-check Steele, but I don't think he really cares if what he's saying is accurate. They see this as a propaganda war, so in their minds the truthfulness or accuracy of what they say is not the measure of it's success, but whether or not it can be made to stick in the minds of voters. You might catch them in a thousand blatant lies between now and the Nov elections, but all that matters to them is whether they can fool the electorate into putting them back in power.

Did it not occur to anyone at the RNC to think, "You know, if we use retirements as a baseline, and our retirements outnumber theirs, we may look foolish"?

Who the hell cares? The media isn't going to look at anything else, most people don't read blogs...and he's Republican so he can get away with it.

there you go again, making a realty based technique. You'd never cut it in the GOP.

The number of retirements might be less meaningful than the number of vulnerable seats being opened up. Bayh's decision to leave effectively gives his seat to a Republican. My impression is that the same is true of many Dem House retirements, but that could be wrong. Steve, do you have an estimate of the number of vulnerable open seats each party has, rather than just a count of raw open seats?

but don't you see that facts don't matter and that it makes a better story for the dems to be "running for the hills?"
the dems were set up to fail. in a sense, i don't think we as the american public, are really invested in the long and painful process of rebuilding, since it requires looking honestly at our own failures. it's much better to close off the imperfect options we have left and embrace a fantasy than to deal with reality.

A fifth point for your list: Polls show that Bayh would crush any likely Republican that ran against him.

Contrary to Steele's assertion that Dem's constituents are angry with them and won't support them, Bayh's seem firmly behind him (though I cannot begin to imagine why).

Did it not occur to anyone at the RNC to think, "You know, if we use retirements as a baseline, and our retirements outnumber theirs, we may look foolish"?

Why would they, when the so-called "liberal media" has already -- surprise, surprise! -- adopted the anti-Democrat narrative regardless of the facts?

Someone noted that Harold Ford, Jr, would be moving to Indiana....

LIKE A STEELE TRAP?

More like a papier mache whoopee cushion....

JSM is on to something. The context of retirements certainly matters. Why is the person retiring? What's he or she leaving to do? How likely is it that the seat will flip? While Republican retirements certainly outnumber Democrat retirements so far (and it's foolish not to consider that when talking purely numbers), Steve seems to try to act as if there's nothing bad for Democrats in the retirement story (a bit of spin in itself?) when in actuality Democrats by and large are leaving a bad environment (and often because of a bad environment), and that's not the case for Republicans.

Evan Bayh spouts pathetic blue doggerel about "left wing taking over" and not enough bipartisanship etc. Idiot. The Dems watered down and crawled to make the HC"R" Bill as worthless as could be, threw away the public option and so forth. Bye Bayh, we hardly knew ye and don't really need ye.

Steele just wants to find out if anybody is listening. Earning his pay as always, Steve is listening so I don't have to. Wake me up if Steele says anything intelligent.

I don't see the error Steve sees. Steele isn't looking at it quantitatively, as Steve appears to be. He's offering a qualitative comment about Democrat retirements, one that he thinks is not a comment one can reasonably offer about Republican retirements.

It's not enough to point this out to other Democrats. We got to push this into the media, push back against the "Democrats in flight" meme where it counts.

But the Democrats are in flight. There is a different quality to the Democrat departures. Steele is correct.

Steele's staff is there to suck his balls.

They don't do research.

"You know, if we use retirements as a baseline, and our retirements outnumber theirs, we may look foolish"?
Will they look foolish?

Or will people just listen to what they say on the TV and believe it?

I liked R.Maddow's observations last night that though Bayh quit at the last minute, it allows the Democrats to avoid a primary fight and simply name a strong candidate. The Republs meanwhile have two unknowns and a douchebag running in a heated primary. Maybe if the Democrats man up a bit, the seat isn't a lost cause.

DelCapslock has it exactly right. Facts are entirely irrelevant to propoganda.

There is a different quality to the Democrat departures.

I'd love to hear what this magical "quality" might be.

"Bye Bayh, we hardly knew ye and don't really need ye."
Posted by: neil b on February 15, 2010 at 6:57 PM

We know him far too well, and will be far better off without him.
While it would clearly be better if a Dem were to win his former seat, even the worst Rethug replacement would be a huge step up from Bayh. It would remove one more of FauxNews's pet Dem's, who clearly confer greater credibility on the Publican narratives they spout than would any Repuke.
For the Publicans to attack Democrats, Democratic proposals, and the Democratic (ie, factual) world-view is just a given. But when turncoat sellout "Democrats" mouth the same lies, they carry more weight.
Why else would the Pubbie-propagandist mass media give so much attention to the blatherings of Bayh, Nelson, Landrieu, Baucus, and worst of all, LIEberman? Why else would Zell Miller have been a star at the '04 Publican convention?
The sooner we can rid ourselves of all such scum, the better off we'll be.

"I'd love to hear what this magical 'quality' might be."

Democrat seats that are being vacated are far and away more likely to flip than Republican seats that are being vacated, and incumbent polling in the case of Democrats (the Kos +20 outlier notwithstanding) was largely very weak prior to retirement announcements. One would be a fool to think fear of losing has not been a major factor (if not THE factor) in most Democrat retirements. For whatever reason Republicans are leaving office now, it's certainly not because they fear losing (except perhaps in very few instances when encoutering a challenge from the right).

Republicans and Democrats are leaving office for different reasons. That's the qualitative difference, and there's nothing magical about it.

hmm... thank you for this :)