Politico uncritically regurgitates GOP line? unpossible

That's the Story? (#GalacticFail Edition) | Talking Points Memo: "Only it didn't work out according to plan. The president came, talked, took questions. And with the president there making his own arguments it was much more difficult for folks like Pence and others to claim, unrebutted, that Health Care Reform was going to cost $50 trillion, enforce mandatory castration and have one out of five grannies ritually slaughtered on a stone slab the bend the cost curve for longterm care. Put simply, the Republicans came off looking kind of stupid, unable to make their arguments when the president was there to point out the holes in their arguments. In this case, I was sympathetic to the president and to reform. So I'm sure people who didn't share those sympathies saw the whole encounter differently. But House Republicans' reaction then and now suggests they saw it pretty much as I did -- that the president embarrassed them. Not by crashing the event, or ambushing them. But just because he did better at it than they thought he would and they didn't do well at all. They invited him to make him look diminished. But he ended up making them look unserious and unprepared because they weren't able to respond when he pointed out the holes in their arguments."