We here at VDB like to think of ourselves as entirely accountable for our own predictions, theories, insights, and hail-Mary election calls.

When we get it wrong, we come clean.*

[*Unless there’s some way to weasel out of it, or we have the sense that nobody’s paying attention.]

But generally speaking — and with an asterisk (*) in case anyone plans to call us on it in the future in any way — we stand behind our word.

And on the issue of Martha Rainville and the $2,000 PAC donation from Roy Blunt (who got part of the money from Big Tobacco and part from the indicted Tom Delay) we were pretty darn clear in our expectations.

From March 29:

“The [Rainville] campaign’s treatment of the issue has swerved from laughable denial, to delay, to odd claims of personal privilege (’It’s a personal decision for Martha’). It seems fairly clear that the campaign will ultimately reject the donation; they’re clumsy, but not stupid.”

We were dead wrong, it turns out: the Rainville campaign is, apparently, stupid. We apologize for the mistake.

On the 31st of March, two days later, Rainville’s people issued the following statement, in part:

“Williston, VT - Martha Rainville has decided to accept the $2,000 campaign contribution from the political action committee of Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri. Rep. Blunt is a respected Congressman who has been re-elected five times, receiving over 70% of the vote in his home state in 2004.

“Democratic Party officials have been clamoring for Martha Rainville to return the campaign contribution, citing the ‘culture of corruption that is running rampant in Washington’ and referencing ‘tainted money.’ Martha stands by her position that she will not take money directly from the tobacco industry, and acceptance of Rep. Blunt’s contribution is consistent with that policy” [emphasis mine].

Let’s go over that last line again, because it says a great deal about Rainville’s approach to campaign finance generally, and her regard for her own word specifically.

Rainville has said earlier in the campaign that she would not take money from the tobacco industry. And after the Burlington Free Press and others pointed out that Roy Blunt’s PAC is heavily subsidized by Big Tobacco, she professed ignorance but said she’d think about whether taking the money was consistent with her “values” — in other words, whether there was any wiggle room in her previous campaign promise.

And lo and behold, there was room.

Or at least there was room if she amended the original promise. Now Rainville promises only to avoid taking money “directly” from Big Tobacco.

And you have to imagine this policy will be now consistent across the board: Rainville will never under any circumstances accept funds directly from organized crime, or directly from pharmaceutical companies, or factory farms looking to dump their mountains of pig excrement while no one’s looking.

We called Rainville’s campaign staff “thumb-fingered” in our last post, but that seems to have been too kind by half.

What the word “is” quickly became for Bill Clinton, “directly” may very well become for Martha Rainville.

But that’s not the whole of it.

No, Rainville’s statement goes on to continue the argument her campaign floated a few weeks back: that everyone does it, and therefore everyone should keep doing it.

Or in Rainville’s own words, when asked about Blunt’s monetary relation to Delay, “All the members in a sense are associated with each other in Washington . . . There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on and I’m not going to pre-judge anybody.”

The March 31st statement goes on to try to tar Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emmanuel with the corruption brush. And then, after slinging this rather thin mud, the statement concludes: “Martha Rainville hopes the race for Vermont’s lone Congressional seat will focus on the many important issues of concern to Vermonters, rather than the mud-slinging and guilt by association that has marked the early stages of the race.”

Okay, certainly parts of this document are humorous, and we’re all for yucking it up when Republicans shoot themselves in the foot, as Rainville’s done on this entire Blunt donation story.

But there’s something deadly serious going on here as well.

This Blunt story is a microcosm of the Republican approach nationwide: faced with mounting evidence of historic levels of corruption — selling legislation on the House floor, lobbyists writing legislation in the Vice President’s office, half of the GOP leadership facing investigation and indictment — these people have no option but to continue to take dirty money in order to fuel a message that Democrats are just as dirty on the issue, if not more so.

And that’s exactly what Rainville has done here.

She knows the money is dirty, she knows it violates her own clear campaign pledge — but she also knows that if she swears off this $2000, she’ll miss out on all the gravy due to come down the trough from Blunt in the next six months.

So they’ve decided to bite the bullet, weather the criticism, and use the cash to make the public forget all about it.

Which leads to an inexorable conclusion: Rainville is already, baby step by baby step, becoming addicted to the national Republican brand of politics.

And we will say it again: this is not just any seat, but Bernie Sanders’s seat, a seat synonymous with speaking truth to power. Republican Lite, funded by Republican Dark, would be a sell-out of major proportions.

How major? Back when we were trying to convince David Zuckerman to pull back from the race, VDB argued that Zuckerman should run statewide, just not in this particular race:

“Not this race, not now, not if it means throwing Bernie Sanders’s seat — of all the seats in all the aisles in all of the halls of Congress — to this particularly corrupt gang of Republicans. It would be like watching Gandalf relinquish his place on the Council of Elrond, only to have Saruman somehow slither into it.”

And that was written before Rainville slipped out of a promise by retroactively inserting the word “directly,” before she began defending Roy Blunt as a “life-long public servant.”

Before Martha began alternating between indecision, and bad decisions.