Talking Heads from the Wax Museum

Sunday brings White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer to five morning shows claiming the GOP is trying to “drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations.”

Pfeiffer’s Energizer Bunny Presidential defense counterpoints the usual suspects wheeled out from the punditry wax museum and animated with higher-volume loops of their usual spiels.

After Pfeiffer’s pitch on “Meet the Press,” David Gregory features a parade of Madame Tussaud figures starting with Mitch McConnell, frozen in his usual startled owl expression, barely moving his lips to  refute a 1987 tape of himself asserting that tax laws are “being abused not just by people on the right but most of the so-called charitable organizations who are involved...in arguable violations of their tax-free status and violations of the campaign laws...on the left.”

Facing voters next year, McConnell deviates only enough not to jump on the Benghazi bandwagon but insist that “getting to the bottom of this is an important investigation.”

On the following panel Peggy Noonan turns up her Rupert Murdochian pitch about the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate,” while sitting next to a Bob Woodward effigy mouthing the Obama blame for not being a strong enough President that is now his signature theme in the post-Nixon era.

To cap it all, David Gregory trots out a true figure from the is-he-still-alive-? past, Don Rumsfeld, to plug his new book about leadership.

Mellowed by being a great-grandfather, he is now snideness-free and advises, “If you foul up, tell the boss and correct it fast...Bad news doesn’t get better with time.”

If only he had told George W soon enough about al Qaeda and nuclear weapons in Iraq...

But that was then. Wasn’t it?