Or at least it was. Tuesday night may have shattered the Myth of Rove, just as it shattered Rove himself when he had a meltdown in front of millions on Fox News viewers after the network called Ohio for Obama. The moment, which has since gone viral, was the perfect encapsulation of Emperor Has No Clothes realization that Rove is now experiencing. Rove was proven wrong. On live TV. By Fox News. And of course, that wasn’t the only thing he got wrong. He blew the whole election, predicting Romney would win.

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But while Bachmann may be even crazier than Palin on questions of public policy, she seems to manage to hold things together as a candidate. She can answer questions from the news media. She is putting together a professional campaign rather than relying on amateur advisors. She takes care to point out frequently that she is a former tax lawyer, and she does not engage in Palin's visceral anti-intellectualism, giving herself the aura of a plausible president, at least in the minds of Republican voters. Bachmann may well combine Palin's most powerful traits without her crippling organizational failures.

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Olive Tree Ministries, based out of Maple Grove, Minn., produces a weekly radio show and a newsletter, and it is also obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann's been on Markell's radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:

When Minneapolis' City Pages first reported [6] on Bachmann's relationship with Markell in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she's known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann's church in the late 1970s. "My hunch is that they misquoted her," Markell says. "She's been at my conference. Why she would have said [otherwise], I don't know."

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Trump's is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It's not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

"Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn't have realized that your entirely pointless search for the "long-form" birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book's publication.

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"America has won the war on terror," Bush shouts. "Tonight, I am proud to say, Osama bin Laden is in hell." The president explains that the terrorist mastermind was "taken out" by American forces in Afghanistan, along with the entire senior leadership of al-Qaida. Crowds spontaneously gather in celebration outside the White House, with handmade signs ("THESE COLORS DON'T RUN," "LET'S ROLL") in plain view of cable news cameras set up beforehand according to a White House communications office suggestion. A professional-quality sound system blares Lee Greenwood. Then, fireworks.

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So documentarian Alex Gibney writes today of Boehner's recently hired policy director, Brett Loper. Before joining team Boehner, Loper was, naturally, a medical device lobbyist, whose job was to protect the profits of the medical device industry at the expense of, among other things, the federal deficit. And before that, he worked for the gloriously amoral Tom DeLay.

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Here's the touching story of Williams' rise from sleeping on the streets to a national media sensation -- all thanks to YouTube.

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In an editorial today titled "McConnell's true colors," the Louisville Courier-Journal writes (emphasis ours):

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In a memo to employees, the publisher of The Star-Ledger of Newark says the newspaper is expected to lose about $10 million this year. The newspaper lost about $9 million last year.

Publisher Richard Vezza writes that full-time employees will be offered a buyout that will pay them one year's salary plus medical benefits. Employees will have 45 days to make a decision.

Employees hired before Jan. 1, 2006 will be eligible. In the memo, Vezza says he hasn't set a target number for the buyouts.

Vezza also wrote in the memo that salaries would be adjusted and some job duties could be combined.

In 2008, more than 300 employees took buyouts.

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According to conventional media wisdom -- always heavily influenced by Republican noisemakers -- the Democrats should expect to suffer because two powerful committee chairs from their party are undergoing ethics investigations. But why should Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats take the blame when they brought reform that led to those investigations, regardless of the political consequences?

Yet, having thrown out the bums who tolerated corruption for so long under Republican leadership, the public is supposedly itching to throw out their replacements, who have reformed the House rules, created a new Office of Congressional Ethics, and handled every case impartially, as promised when the Democrats took over in January 2007. Voters have plenty of reasons to feel frustrated and angry this year, but ethics reform is not among them.

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The "Be Counted, Represent" campaign was announced Wednesday at a press conference in Los Angeles.

It offers music downloads and a chance at concert tickets to cell phone users who share their e-mail addresses and phone numbers with organizers and forward information about the census to their friends.

Organizers hope the pro-census messages will zip throughout the social networks of youngsters who can persuade their parents to fill out and return their census forms.

The messages will stress that undercounted areas risk losing funding for transit, infrastructure and other needs.

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But talk of miracles and head winds aside, I think John McCain really does have a decent shot at winning, and that's not just because I'm a longtime Republican political operative. Despite what the polls seem to be saying, a closer look at the numbers shows that a Democratic victory is not a foregone conclusion. Why? Because if history is any guide, Barack Obama, as an African-American candidate for political office, needs to be polling consistently above 50 percent to win. And in crucial battleground states, he isn't.

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Bob Moser thinks so. In his newly published and smartly written book, "Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority," Moser argues that the conventional wisdom that took hold in the mid-1990s -- namely, that Bill Clinton-led, Democratic Leadership Council-inspired centrism had saved the Democratic Party nationally, and at least partially in the South as well -- was in fact the force that drove wary working-class white Southerners into the arms of the Republicans for good.

Moser, a North Carolina native who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., relays the story of a conversation he had at the 2000 Democratic National Convention with a female Democrat from his home state who laughed when he told her he was looking to talk to liberals in the Tar Heel State delegation. "The state had historically been the South's most progressive," writes Moser, saddened and dismayed by the woman's laughter. "But after eight years of Bill Clinton and his pro-corporate, anti-New Deal, Republican-Lite DLC having assumed near-complete control of the national party, were there any liberals still active enough to be delegates?"

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Paging Clinton haters!

Thursday, Broadsheet discussed a Republican political operative who is using an acronym to sling the C-word at Hillary Clinton. Citizens United Not Timid, aka CUNT, is a political action committee dedicated to "educating the public about what Hillary Clinton really is," by selling T-shirts with a red, white and blue female crotch logo. Classy.

Yet, there are other creative ways to tar Clinton with the C-word via T-shirt. Today, we offer this photo of a special rebus puzzle T-shirt for country music fans who hate Hillary. Let's keep the misogynist Hillary hate-wear coming! Send pics or links to broadsheet@salon.com.

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That was the cry of the lovelorn schoolteacher in the classic 1997 film "In and Out," after her diffident fiancé reveals his true orientation (and dumps her for Tom Selleck). Ten years later, more than a few discombobulated Republicans must be muttering the same question, despite the fervent denial of Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig that he is, indeed, gay. As one embarrassing episode follows another, with almost predictable regularity, perhaps it is time for Republicans and conservatives to ask themselves an obvious question: What makes the Republican Party -- and the conservative movement more generally -- so attractive to closeted homosexual men?

Somewhere in the textbooks of psychosexual pathology there may be a straightforward answer, so to speak. Does the party draw closeted men because they can hide behind Republican homophobia? Or does the party promote homophobia as a political ruse while closeted men run the show? Whatever the answer, the result is routine humiliation and personal destruction. Even worse, the party's culture of concealment encourages right-wing gay-bashing, such as Tucker Carlson's grotesque boast that he and another adolescent thug beat up a gay man who "bothered" him in a bathroom years ago.

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It was a different story in Illinois. The Democrats won everything. They took the governorship for the first time in 30 years. They captured the state Senate. This despite running a ticket made up of ward bosses' children and in-laws. I remember sitting on my couch in Chicago and thinking, "If the Democrats want to turn it around, they need to take some lessons from the machine around here. Chicago Democrats have no scruples. They treat political offices as feudal inheritances. They shake down contributors like a corrupt pope selling indulgences. They're sleazy, they're arrogant but they WIN."

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On Thursday, he did just that. Crist, who became governor after handily defeating Democrat Jim Davis in November, ushered in a proposal that will quickly restore the voting rights of most of Florida's felons as soon as they are released from prison. The plan looks sure to alter the political landscape in the nation's most populous -- and electoral-vote-rich -- swing state.

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Since George Bush took office, his administration has been not so quietly dismantling the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing the nation's civil rights laws, and doing it for the same reason the eight federal prosecutors were fired: to use the enforcement power of the federal government for Republican gain. Instead of attending to the Civil Rights Division's historic mission, addressing the legacy of slavery by enforcing anti-discrimination laws, the Bush administration has employed the division to advance the political agenda of a key GOP constituency, the Christian right and also, quite literally, to get Republicans elected.

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MoveOn's longtime allies in the antiwar movement, however, look at the bill -- and MoveOn's support for it -- and see something very different. Groups who call for immediate withdrawal argue that MoveOn's position is a betrayal of their cause, and that Pelosi's bill merely continues the war while allowing Democrats to say they've done something to oppose it. Cindy Sheehan, the "peace mom" who favors immediate withdrawal, describes MoveOn as supporting "the slow-bleed strategy of the Democratic leadership." Gail Murphy, of the group CodePink, says, "MoveOn has taken a compromised position -- in fact I think they were involved behind the scenes in creating a compromised position." Other peace activists call MoveOn's e-mail poll of its membership a sham. If MoveOn's millions of members knew the full details of the bill, they would surely oppose it.

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