A leftover from yesterday morning which I figured was too stale to write about until I saw that even Reason was kinda sorta accusing him of stating his own policy preference here. C’mon: It’s pretty clear that he’s speaking descriptively, not prescriptively, no? He even says, after making his point about repealing the Second Amendment, “I don’t think that’s an answer.” This is the same guy who, two years ago, in the thick of the left’s post-Newtown gun-grabbing push, made the case against a national gun registry so insistently on “This Week” that Terry Moran accused him of being a “black helicopters” paranoiac about the federal government. (You can watch that clip below too, via Think Progress.) Pay attention to what he says to Chris Wallace after mentioning the Second Amendment and you’ll see that he’s making a familiar point: The problem with Dylann Roof wasn’t guns, it’s the fact that he was troubled and isolated and people who were in a position to know that didn’t get him any help. Translated into slogan-speak, that’s “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Even if you’re not willing to believe that “Tokyo Rove” is a mainstream Republican at heart on this issue, surely he’s smart enough to be a mainstream Republican in his public pronouncements. He’s already worried about his influence in the party declining in the age of Super PACs, especially after American Crossroads’s famously abysmal 2012 performance. Getting crosswise with the vast majority of GOPers who support gun rights would be political suicide for a GOP consultant, even an establishmentarian who might be willing to challenge the base on some of its other litmus tests like immigration. (Chris Christie, who otherwise prides himself on speaking blunt truths to political enemies, is desperate to make nice with righties on the subject lately in hopes that they won’t punish him too much for his prior heresies.) And remember, what Rove’s being accused of here isn’t just getting crosswise with righties on guns, it’s calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment, a position otherwise found only in the furthest leftward reaches of the Democratic Party. He may be a RINO but he ain’t a dumb RINO.

Long story short, this seems like a classic case of a guy who’s lost so much credibility already among his party’s base that he can’t get the benefit of the doubt even where he deserves it. Normally this degree of suspicion of bad faith in an ambiguous statement is reserved for things said by members of the other party. That tells you a lot about how far the distance is these days between grassroots conservatives and the party’s leaders.