If irritating the Left is a good measure of how conservative a political candidate is (and admittedly it’s not a perfect measure of conservatism), then Bill Cassidy appears to have positioned himself as the conservative candidate in next year’s Senate race.

We’re speaking, of course, about the ginned-up national “controversy” about our post of last Thursday, in which we opined that Mary Landrieu’s vote to kill 240 years of Senate tradition and do away with the filibuster of judicial nominees put her on record as supporting a rather fascistic exercise on the part of the Senate’s Democrat majority – and added to that opinion a satirical fark that looked a whole lot like this…

Cassidy’s campaign manager Joel DiGrado posted a link on Twitter to the article itself, with no mention of the image. And because he did that, the Louisiana Democrat Party and the Landrieu campaign satisfied their desperate need for a distraction from Landrieu’s obnoxious vote to kill the filibuster by ginning up a faux “outrage” over “the Cassidy campaign’s tweeting of fascist  images of Mary Landrieu.”

It was laughable and stupid, and it was an object lesson in the lengths the Left will go to in order to divert attention from the substance of their actions. Mary Landrieu voted to kill the filibuster in order to pave the way for the Obama administration to pack the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals with wild, radical, irresponsibly leftist judges who would, for example, rubber-stamp the regulations the administration is writing for Obamacare – but the REAL controversy her supporters want the public focused on is the appropriateness of a Photoshop image which took a local political blog at most 10 minutes to generate.

So the matter simmers over the weekend, particularly thanks to the inexplicably unserious statement of the supposed Tea Party candidate in the race Rob Maness agreeing with Landrieu that Cassidy should apologize for DiGrado having tweeted a link to an article criticizing her vote to kill the filibuster, and today in Lake Charles Cassidy was asked about the controversy and his supposed role in it.

The answer was, we thought, worthy of a successful candidate for the U.S. Senate…

KPLC 7 News, Lake Charles, Louisiana

The quote, in case you’re not able to watch the video…

“You know, someone told me about that, but what is important about that is the article in which Senator Landrieu voted to give … dictatorial powers to the Democratic party in the U.S. Senate, and in that now, after 200 and something years of our republic, Democrats in the Senate have the ability to appoint judges among other races to D.C circuit without having any sort of buy-in from Republicans. The importance of that is (the) D.C. Circuit court is what approves these EPA that threaten to hurt oil and gas and the jobs that are connected with oil and gas,” Cassidy said.

Just so. It’s smart politics and a good argument for Cassidy to mention the D.C. Circuit becoming a rubber stamp for the EPA for a number of reasons; first, oil and gas is a hot button in Lake Charles. Second, Landrieu likes to fancy herself as an oil-and-gas-friendly Senator even though her record of being an effective or decisive voice in that body for the energy industry isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and this is a good example of that. And third, everybody has been talking about the implications of a “packed” D.C. Circuit on Obamacare; here comes Cassidy to offer up yet another angle to describe how bad – and how consequential that “nuclear option” vote Landrieu made really was.

It also doesn’t hurt that Cassidy is on the record – recently – on this very issue.

But most of all, we’re happy that Cassidy didn’t wilt under the ridiculous pressure from the Left that he should apologize for something he had no role in. Instead, he turned the conversation back to the substance of why there was a “controversy” in the first place, and in doing so he put the spotlight back on Landrieu’s terrible voting record.

That’s a smart candidate who’s on message. That’s a man of substance who wouldn’t be baited into a fake controversy.

That’s a conservative who can win.