The Republican National Committee apparently liked one former Democratic National Committee staffer's clever microsite knocking Republican then-candidate Tim Pawlenty so much, they decided to just, uh, repurpose it. Media consultant and former DNCer Matt Ortega is tweeting Thursday that the RNC's new site, Obama's New Ideas To Fix The Economy, is basically the same blank page with a blinking cursor he designed last year for a site called Exciting Things About Tim Pawlenty. The respective points would be that Obama has no new ideas and Tim Pawlenty is boring as heck.

Ortega's even captured a screen grab of the CSS for both sites side by side to point out that someone at the RNC seems to have simply lifted his code and changed some words and fonts here and there.

As Ortega writes, "define irony." (The RNC was trying to promote "new ideas" after all.) We're reaching out to the RNC for comment.

Update: RNC spokesman Tim Miller responds, "If the Democrats defense to the President having no new ideas to fix the economy is a complaint about 'CSS code' then their message is even more out-of-touch with what Americans struggling in the Obama economy care about than we thought it was." This is, of course, not the "Democrats" defense of the president so much as a single Democrat's defense of his own snarky idea, but at any rate, we'll file that one under "won't be offering him attribution." 

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