You Mean It's Behind The NRO Paywall? Well I Hope You're Happy; You've Ruined My Weekend.

(h/t Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson)

OKAY, first, if you don't know--and there's no reason you should--Mitch "The Bonzai Governor" Daniels is called "The Blade"--when he is, which is never except during fawning, deceptive, and delusional demi-decadal profiles in NatRev or The Wall Street Journal--only because it's the "nickname" George W. Bush bestowed upon him, apparently without knowing who th' fuck he was, and certainly with his usual firm grasp on hyperreality. Mitch Daniels was Bush's first OMB director, meaning he's the guy who personally oversaw the Most Disastrous Administration in US History's reduction of an inherited $236 B surplus to a $400 B deficit in just two years. He is, in other words, "The Blade" the way some 350-pound slob is "Tiny". After that striking success he turned his expertise on the unsuspecting citizens of his putative home state, the half-infomed denizens of which had given him his first taxpayer-funded sinecure; we do not know, for certain, why Mitch Daniels decided to Get Out Of Dodge and into The Indiana Governor's Mansion an RV combing over the backroads of the Hoosier State, but we wouldn't be surprised if it involved revenging himself on whomever had stuffed his ass in a locker in North Central High School ("Home of the Panthers"), no doubt repeatedly, between 1963 and 1967.

What we do know is this: no one who's paid the slightest bit of attention to Daniels' public "service" career would portray him as any sort of Cutlery, at least not if they intended to make the case to the general public rather than the Internet Boys' Choir they dunned for the privilege. Daniels' economic record as governor may be debatable, in that it is nowhere near as bad as his record at the OMB (which would have required the state to its previous status as the floor of the vast Cretaceous inland sea), but even that debatability is the result of a clear PR effort to paint everything the man has done as a Bold Economic Triumph sprung Athena-like from his massive brain, not something resembling tangible results. The difference here being that, unlike with Zeus, in this case the gestation gave everyone else a headache.

And if we're actually interested in governance, and not simply finding a Republican we hope might turn out to be the next Mitt Romney, fake history included, we might tap the brakes a few times before touting Indiana's Economic Miracle full throttle; The Blade suddenly turned into The Shrinking Violet when things turned unequivocally to shit after last year's elections. By 2011 he's likely to have morphed into The Self-Inflicted Wound.

And sure, sure; the yawning chasm between Republican gubernatorial hagiography and what is sometimes known as "reality" has been my near-constant companion since California gave us Ronald Reagan, meaning before this current crop of NatRev geniuses ever drew enough breath to complain that poor people were getting their oxygen for free, meaning I don't really need to read that article any more than I want to read the article. What I would like to know is how anyone would imagine that portraying their man as Todd Luiso in American Ninja VI was a good idea?