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UPDATECrooks and Liars has the Bolten video on this -- well worth a watch.

Tim Russert was on a high simmer this morning on Meet the Press.  No biscuit for him today -- but he scored anyway.  (And, frankly, I was left wondering if Russert has been reading Jane?)

Pressing Joshua Bolten, WH Chief of Staff, on the hypocritical inconsistencies in President Bush's veto of the stem cell bill, and the comments by Tony Snow that the President thinks that the destruction of human embryos for research purposes is murder -- Russert hit the nail on the head by asking why, then, the President doesn't outlaw in vitro clinics and all stem cell research if he truly believes that it is murder.

After Bolten began stammering his way through a non-answer dodge and weave tap-dance-a-thon, I realized something:  their soft underbelly is showing on so many fronts, the message machine is no longer working with rapid-fire precision. 

Bolten tip toed through any number of questions this morning on the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, the mess in Iraq, our lack of any diplomatic or foreign policy initiatives that come close to working...and then the questions on stem cell research, where Bolten tried very hard to say nothing that would offend anyone, and succeeded in offending people who think science ought to be respected and the entire evangelical base by exposing the Bush failure to walk his smarmy, hypocritical talk about respecting life while allowing more than 400,000 blastocysts to be destroyed via in vitro clinics.

No one likes to learn that they've been played for a fool -- here's hoping that the hypocritical differences between the public statements supporting "life" and the real actions which do no such thing other than at a surface level to do Presidential political CYA for public relations purposes hit home with the evangelical crowd. 

The message:  we'll do only as much as we have to do to make the fundamentalists happy, but we really don't walk our talk.  (Remember how Michael Scanlon talked about the evangelical political machine via Ralph Reed?  Oh yeah, hypocrisy, thy name is Republican.)