American Republican legislators have begun aiming their sights on a major policy initiative: the nation's tax code. Any changes will certainly impact the American technology sector, but before getting to that possible impact, there's the matter of the GOP's publicity campaign on the matter.

On Wednesday afternoon, the GOP showed that it could use some help in its attempts to make its sales pitch look "hip."

In a blog post titled "What Do The Legend of Zelda and the American Tax Code Have In Common?" House Republicans originally wrote:

The Legend of Zelda series is Nintendo’s best-selling video game franchise enjoyed by more than two generations of gamers. The action-adventure game was released in 1986, only one year after Nintendo’s founding in 1985. And you know what else was released in 1986? Yeah, you do. The last major reform to the American tax code was signed into law in 1986.

The blog post was online for more than an hour before being taken down; a replacement with a factual correction has since gone live.

The original post went on to make the GOP's case about tax code reform, but any gaming historian probably wouldn't get to that part without exploding over its factual errors. Most notably, Nintendo was founded quite a bit earlier than that: 1889, to be precise, as a card manufacturer in Japan. (If the House GOP meant Nintendo of America, they'd still be wrong; that division was founded in 1980.) Additionally, as that sentence was written, it proclaimed that The Legend of Zelda is Nintendo's biggest selling franchise. A certain mushroom-gobbling plumber would argue otherwise.

There's also the issue of the House GOP choosing the game's Japanese release year on that nation's Famicom Disk System, as opposed to its 1987 launch in the States, to declare that the game is the same age as the American tax code. (And since the Zelda mention was relatively brief, the author at least didn't make the common out-of-touch error of mixing up who Zelda and Link are.)

But even with a correction about Nintendo's founding year, House GOP leadership really dropped the boomerang with the intent of this post: to use Zelda's decades of existence as a comparison point to argue that America's "current [tax] code is far beyond repair." The market would certainly say otherwise about Zelda 1, which was part of a package of games so successful last year that Nintendo couldn't produce enough of them to satisfy demand. And that's nothing compared to the original game's ability to continue popping up on "best video games of all time" lists.

The GOP attempted a similar comparison to a lasting piece of '80s pop culture earlier this month in a post titled, "What Do Ferris Bueller and the American Tax Code Have In Common?"

Representatives from Nintendo did not respond to requests for comment in time for this article's publication.