It has become an article of faith among right-wing bloggers — and, as of yesterday, the Washington Times — that a memo identifying the Terri Schiavo case as a “great political issue” for Republicans was a fake, planted by the Democrats or created out of whole cloth by the liberal media conspiracy.
Only it wasn’t.
As the Washington Post reports this morning, a staffer for Republican Sen. Mel Martinez admitted yesterday that he wrote the memo. The admission — and with it, the resignation of Brian Darling, Martinez’ legal counsel — came after Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin revealed that Martinez had handed Harkin a copy of the memo on the Senate floor during debate on the Schiavo bill. Like every other Republican senator, Martinez had previously insisted that he’d never seen the memo before.
