Because I have very little that is nice to say about Martinez I tend to see this confirmation that he is nothing more than another neo-con toady and a suckup to Cuban Americans by the bushites as a good thing.

You only need to spend a few seconds with Mel Martinez to realize the Florida Republican Senator is a few beers short of a six pack, but his lame-brained excuse for how a memo outlining the GOP’s plan to turn the Terri Schiavo tragedy into a political opportunity fell into Democratic hands sends political intelligence to subterranean levels.

Martinez claims he gave the memo to Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin because he thought they were only “talking points” and says he never read the document before turning it over to the opposition.

“Unbeknownst to me, instead of my one page on the bill, I had given him a copy of the now infamous memo that at some point along the way came into my possession,” Martinez claims in a statement.

The memo that “at some point along the way came into my possession” was written by the Senator’s staff legal counsel, Brian H. Darling, a 39-year-old former lobbyist for the for the ultra-right-wing Alexander Strategy Group started by scandal-scarred House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s former chief of staff..

Harkin passed the memo around and copies found their way to ABC News and The Washington Post. When the memo became public, Republicans screamed conspiracy and claimed it was all a liberal plot. Their bleating continued with the truth-be-damned conservative bloggers who tried to equate the memos with the infamous Rathergate memos about Bush’s murky military service.

Martinez, the Senate’s point man on the Schiavo bill, screamed the loudest.

“I just took it for granted that we wouldn't be that stupid. It was never my intention to in any way politicize this issue,” he claimed.

So, by taking things for granted, Martinez, who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Bush’s first term, blithely turns over a piece of political dynamite to the Democrats?

In doing so, he proved that, yes, he and his fellow Republicans are, indeed, that stupid.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_6549.shtml