Richard Mourdock's Staged Responses to Health Ruling When a politician responds to something another politician has not yet said, we call that a "prebuttal." It's a variant is the "presponse," in which networks air the opposition party's "response" to a State of the Union Address that was taped prior to delivery. Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party favorite who defeated Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary in May, is fine-tuning another "pre" category, the "preaction." Mr. Mourdock taped responses to several possible outcomes of the Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act - the court upholds the law, the court overturns it, the court splits, the court doesn't provide an answer. Mr. Mourdock delivers his preactions in a casual, off-hand manner, as if someone just happened to come upon him with a camera to ask about the ruling (s). The public, of course, was not supposed to see these staged videos, but someone posted them to YouTube and Talking Points Memo copied them before the Mourdock campaign took them down. The Mourdock campaign insists its done nothing wrong - which is true. The candidate has merely embarrassed himself. He filmed canned responses to a forthcoming Supreme Court decision, presumably so that he could pass one of them off as a real-time reaction to a major news event. Taking a cue from Mr. Mourdock, here are my preactions to the results of the Indiana Senate race. (Mourdock loses) Indiana just dodged a bullet, and so did the United States Senate. (Mourdock wins) Pity poor Indiana, not to mention the United States Senate.