But producer Benen’s criticism, focused on Scott's ancient entanglement with federal prosecutors in his role as founder and chief of Columbia/HCA, is light on facts, obtuse on history, and utterly devoid of context.

In other words, his fulmination embraces the paucity of reflection typical of leftist attacks, which rely almost exclusively on cherrypicking and extrapolation:

1. Scott was at the helm of the hospital giant when the FBI took an interest in Medicare providers in the middle 1990s.
2. Columbia/HCA ultimately accepted the rap on 14 counts of fraudulent billing and paid fines totaling $1.7 billion.
3. Scott, who accepted a golden parachute to resign, exercised the Fifth Amendment 75 times during an unrelated deposition in a civil suit involving Columbia/HCA in Nevada.

That’s enough for Benen, who, in a post Friday, waxes flabbergasted that, while standing up for Trump, Florida’s junior U.S. senator would claim kinship with the GOP’s beleaguered and presumptive presidential nominee over the mistreatment he and his company endured at the hands of a politicized Justice Department.

Benen, who apparently is denied search-engine privileges at MSNBC, imagines Scott’s claim is a recent invention, a fresh, even novel, way to align his re-election campaign with Magatrons who appear poised to deliver a massive Sunshine State victory to Trump.

“Even by contemporary GOP standards,” Benen writes, “this is awfully weird.”

Benen’s snark is an example of why the emergence of “alternative facts” was necessary and inevitable. Never mind that the term is derided by our progressive friends, whose claim — facts are facts; there’s no “alternative” about them — attempts to slam the door on opposing viewpoints.

In Scott’s case, the alternative facts provide important context that refutes the rote conclusion Benen airs from his bespoke selection of “facts.” 

To begin, there’s nothing new, novel, conjured, or invented regarding Scott’s claim about political interference by Bill Clinton’s Justice Department. On that point, he’s been steadfast since Attorney General Janet Reno slapped bullseyes on Medicare providers who helped shoot down HillaryCare in 1993.

When Scott says, “I saw this, it happened to me. I fought HillaryCare and guess what happened? … Justice came after me and attacked me and my company,” it comes from an old wound, one he never has been reluctant to discuss.

In one respect, the age of the gripe would be irrelevant and would even qualify as whining if Columbia/HCA had been alone among the Big Medicine actors presumed to be ripping off taxpayers. Or if none but investor-owned providers had been in on the alleged scam. Or if the timing claimed by Scott didn’t square. None of these qualifiers withstand scrutiny.

In 1995, the Clinton administration announced a “crackdown” on Medicare billing practices across the health-care industry (Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, May 4, 1995). The number of Medicare investigations increased from around 600 in 1992 to more than 2,200 investigations by 1996. At the time, there were tens of thousands of pages of Medicare regulations, and virtually all healthcare companies were affected by the government crackdown.

By 1998, the government “crackdown” was becoming controversial. The healthcare industry started pushing back, complaining that the federal government was classifying many honest mistakes as “fraud,” and playing a game of “Gotcha!” (Forbes, May 18, 1998)

Eventually, the government was forced to launch a program to help train hospital billing personnel in how to properly interpret Medicare billing regulations (Source: “Hospitals get advice on fraud prevention,” USA Today, February 12, 1998).

The list of companies paying substantial fines includes the elite’s elite: Harvard University Hospitals, University of Chicago Hospital, Yale Hospital, Duke University Hospital, John’s Hopkins University Hospital. Columbia/HCA paid the biggest fine not because it was the worst, most craven practitioner, but simply because it was the largest healthcare provider on the planet.

At that, federal prosecutors could not prove what anyone did at Scott’s old shop was intentional, and therefore criminal. Former HCA executives were cleared of wrongdoing by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled the fed’s massive number of Medicare regulations were so frustratingly vague, “reasonable people could disagree over how to interpret them.”

Yes, Columbia/HCA declined to litigate the charges, and instead negotiated a financial way out — a path Scott, who was sufficiently prescient to anticipate the appeals court ruling, vehemently opposed. He wanted the battle; his board wanted to limit any bad publicity. Thus did they part, Scott leaving with a $300 million chunk of the company he started and led to robust success.

And that might have been that, except, having peered into the maw of the government leviathan, Scott chose to attempt to tame it.

Some days — when he gets hysterical blowback from suggesting ancient federal programs ought to come up for recertification from time to time — he must imagine it is a perfectly thankless task.

Then there are days such as Thursday, when he rides to court in a limousine, elbow-to-elbow with the guy who — against odds with which Scott is well familiar — leads the polls in at least six of seven battleground states.

So, context. In a massive story spanning nearly 10 years and most of the 50 states, Benen nails precisely three facts, one of them — Scott brandishing the Fifth Amendment — utterly irrelevant. But his extrapolation is unsupportable, like describing an elephant based on hugging its hind leg.

So, yes. The time could not be more ideal. Let’s have that re-litigation. Let’s have it good and hard.