Biased Media, Dirty Tricks and Special Interests Drove Out Republican
Three days before the special election in New York's 23rd congressional district, the Republicans have lost their candidate. Dede Scozzafava has dropped out. This leaves upstate New York, parts of which have voted for the party of Lincoln since Lincoln, without a Republican choice.
They just have a Democrat -- law professor/Air Force captain Bill Owens.
And a Conservative -- cipher Doug Hoffman.
But no Republican. Chester Arthur would roll over in his grave, which is in New York's First District, which means he couldn't vote for Doug Hoffman in Tuesday's election, just like Doug Hoffman can't.
(Why shouldn't 99% of the money for Doug Hoffman's campaign come from outside the district? He comes from outside the district.)
(Here's the difference between Doug Hoffman and a carpetbagger: A carpetbag has mass and physical form.)
Dede Scozzafava, a lifetime Republican, and the former Mayor of Gouverneur, was driven out of the race by Doug Hoffman's out-of-state money and Doug Hoffman's dirty tricks. This might explain why she declined to endorse Doug Hoffman in her resignation:
I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so.
Which comes off a little bitter.
One of the dirty tricks was setting up a fake website called Draft Dede as a Democrat. The site, which depicts Scozzafava as Emma Goldman, only without the strong Rochester roots, calls itself "An unofficial campaign site for Dede Scozzafava's NY-23 race." I emailed them Wednesday, politely asking who they were and if they really thought they were helping. No reply.
Another dirty trick was the creation of a group of non-existent Scozzafava supporters called Common Sense in America. On Wednesday they bought $150,000 worth of local airtime and started running this ad.
The ad calls Scozzafava "the best choice for progressives" and says she supports gay marriage, the stimulus and card check - an issue that's supposed to enrage you, but about which no one but the Chamber of Commerce gives a damn.
The problem? There's no such thing as Common Sense in America. The group, I mean. According to Politico:
The group, which was founded on October 23, is headed by Arkansas businessman Jackson Stephens, a board member of the Club for Growth. The Club for Growth was one of the first groups to endorse Hoffman. Stephens donated the maximum $4,800 to Hoffman's campaign, and is one of the Club for Growth's leading donors.
Calling the group's phone number - listed on the advertisement - led me to a voice mail from Stephens, which directed all questions about Common Sense in America to Dan Blum, a communications consultant who is serving as a spokesman for the organization. According to FEC records, Blum worked for the Republican National Committee as a staffer as recently as this January.
On Thursday, Politico exposed the ad as a smear and a fake. But as of Saturday morning there was still at least one place linking to it as evidence to "further show liberals and progressives in our district that Dede represents our values and beliefs":
Draft Dede as a Democrat.
Don't you just hate dirty Chicago style politics?
Makes you wonder what Doug Hoffman's imported campaign workers were saying about Dede Scozzafava door-to-door.
Here's another example of what Dede Scozzafava was up against, and why the people of Plattsburgh don't have a Republican to vote for, for the first time in 150 years:
Bill Hennessy is a tea bagger and about the 150th guy to get the idea to write a book and call it The Conservative Manifesto (Right Press, 1993). If he were any more bush league he'd sprout. And even though it's unclear if he's ever been to New York, he says he'll do "whatever it takes" to choose its next congressman.
Here he is on Big Government:
Before the polls open in upper New York on Tuesday morning, thousands of Tea Partiers from states as far away as California will have had an impact on what might otherwise have been an unnoticed special election. ...
Those patriots will soon conduct perhaps the strongest get-out-the-vote campaign ever targeted on a single Congressional election. ...It's as if God has given Tea Partiers the lever that controls the course of the sun. If they all pull together, they make it Morning in America.
"It's as if God has given Tea Partiers the lever that controls the course of the sun." And/or megalomaniac paranoia.
If you're a voter in upstate New York, you should understand why you don't have a Republican candidate anymore. You should know that it's because there are psychotics "from states as far away was California" who want to use you and your vote to "control the sun."
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HOPE. ....for the YOUTH VOTE in this area of NYS. . . . . . this is the only thing that will save us. . . .
youth make up a larger portion of voters ever...2010 and 2012 will show the youth vote even more as it
did in 2008with OBAMA. . . .when a poll is conducted it is usually not the youth who answers the landlines. ...it is the over 50 crowd(of which I am a member), retireeees( i am not retired),
the youth vote is why this country is changing......and most of the over 50 crowd cannot understand this. . . . .. ..
CHANGE will take the youth vote. . . . . .we could see NYS dist 23 roll over to democrat. . . . i believe it
will happen, I'm not far from dist 23. . . . nys went democrat in 2008 I think it will happen again. . . .can't
wait for Snarh to go down
Here is the beginning of the end of the GOP. The extremists branching off and forming the Conservative Party, while the moderates (what's left of them) might stay within the GOP.
Frank Rich of the NY Times made a good point that this is a win-win for the Dems. If the Dem wins great, but if Hoffman wins, which he might since this is a traditionally Republican region, then it will serve as a model for the extreme whack-job fringe of the Republican party. They will feel that their actions are justified, and they will draw their party even farther away from the mainstream of America, and they will lose numerous races until the party rebels against the fringe and takes their party back.
She is a liberal. He is a conservative. That's why she's endorsing the Dem.
Get it?
No, she's a conservative, maybe a moderate; he's a reactionary who doesn't live in the district and has no idea of the concerns of the district's population. That's why she endorsed the only remaining candidate who lives in the district he hopes to serve.
Basically pulling a Hillary Clinton. She wanted to become a Senator from NY to try and launch herself to the White House. She never cared about the state. Promised to create 300,000 new jobs upstate or something like that during her first term. Had a net loss of 50,000.
It'll be interesting to see how the voters react to this carpetbagging attempt by the teabaggers.
If she really endorses the democrat over the conservative, she should have stayed in the race. That would have ensured the win for the democrat by splitting the republican vote.
Mr. Kelly is right. These efforts by far-right conservatives to launch and support third-party candidates to supplant more established and mainstream GOP candidates - thus marginalizing the right-wing movement even further - are atrocious. The GOP has indeed been a grand party in the past, a party of truly great power and influence. If we ever hope to see it return to that position, vigilance must truly be paid to these efforts that will take it down a path to irrevocable irrelevance.
I'm fed up with this BS- "individual liberties vs big government" Republicans no more care about individual liberties than they care about government intervention. It is their government intervention that limits individuals.
They want to control a women's right to choose- which by the way interjects government between a women and her doctor (don't forget Terry Schivo); They don't want homosexuals to have individual rights; They don't believe in democracy because they want to overturn the last election; they have newly discovered fiscal restraint; Spending is okay for war but not for health. I'm sick of it.
IF you are so upset about the government intruding between a a patient and his /her doctor, why aren't you railing aganst ObamaCare? You won't know government intrusion until this goes into effect.
Quo warranto, B.O.?
I love watching conservatives cannibalize their own party.
This is SO typical of their behavior. Just recall how southern conservatives acted during the Revolutionary War- they couldn't be bothered to help... then later on they were to busy killing each other to help defend America.
I for one don't give credit to Palin for what is happening in these elections. She has shown that the last thing she is worried about is the electorate. Look how she abandoned her state in time of need when the money called. What I want the MSM to do is uncover who is buying her time and paying her way. She is not the brightest bulb in the package being presented as a true "GOP teabagger. Who is pulling the strings in this charade? What could the possible aim be to dismantle the GOP, can't think it is only being done to show Obama. There is more to this story than we can even imagine and the sooner we find out the playbook the better off we will be. If I were a Rep. I would be worried about the push of someone to make the party the party of NO WAY.
Well, that did it for me. The republican party is nothing more than extreme conservatives. If you want to reform anything, suddenly your "against freedom" and they'll make any hillbilly the head of the party, as long as he disagrees with everything Obama says or does.
Its sad when Newt Gingrich has become too "liberal" for the party
As the scope, size, and power of government advances, the freedom of the individual recedes.
Yeah, because individuals are SOOOOO free in anarchic states with no centralized governments... free to be raped, murdered, exploited, robbed, conned... and of course, free to find a way to provide for their own education, transportation, clean air and water, etc.
Sorry, but positive government action can GIVE people freedom. Think of how many more people would be FREE to pursue entrepeneurship, or careers that best suit their abilities, if they didn't have to worry about getting health insurance from the "free market!"
Think Somalia.
This election is simply a test to the state of mind of the electorate. If the Republican candidate wins then it will send a clear signal that a large segment of society want to keep a culture more in tune with the 20th Century.
You don't have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to see the Republican Party really doesn't stand for anything other than being against everything.
I think the Republican party, since the election of President Obama, has been moving toward a more conservative way of thinking. There is the possibility that the message of individual freedom and limited government will once again resonate with voters. Recently, campaigning Democrats have not been forced to repudiate those ideas, for Republicans have run candidates that more closely resemble Democrat-Lite. Republicans have perhaps now begun to realize that offering no real choice to voters, is a losing proposition. The Democrat base would as soon have the real thing as a Republican knock-off, and the Republican base never had a real candidate to rally around.
individual freedom to get ripped off by banks and corporations, freedom to find the only job you can get is fighting for their latest "pre-emptive invasion", freedom to be only christian, freedom to not be allowed to be openly gay, freedom to not be allowed to have an abortion even in cases of rape and incest, freedom to have your phone lines tapped at any time for any reason...
"If the Republican candidate wins then it will send a clear signal that a large segment of society want to keep a culture more in tune with the 14th Century."
Fixed.
The situation in New York's 23rd reminds me of when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to The US Supreme Court. Conservatives naturally went bonkers, and Bush then replaced Meirs with Samuel Alito. It should probably be said that conservatives didn't exactly shoot themselves in the foot on that score.
The GOP doesn't realize it yet, but they are increasingly painting themselves farther and farther into the irrelevant corner. They would rather support an unknown entity who claims allegiance to their far-right extremist agenda, rather than support a well-known candidate who is more moderate, but acceptable to the local Republican network. Sooner or later, someone is going to figure this out, and a truly corrupt, criminally-minded candidate is going to get elected simply because he parrotted the Republican agenda, while planning his own secret criminal agenda.
Hey Gronkie, I can sense the swelling giddiness in your post. Are you predicting that the Democrats will sweep tomorrow?
I am far from giddy and I long ago gave up on predicting elections. I am actually a right leaning independent who is thoroughly disgusted with the Republican party as it exists today. I am simply warning that if the GOP doesn't start considering the candidate as a person instead of just endorsing what they say, they will find themselves in real trouble someday soon. In this case, they are willing to throw their support behind a candidate that they know nothing about, simply because of a few statements he has made. They have passed over a perfectly well-qualified candidate, who has the support of the local Republican organization because she isn't in lockstep with every point on the extremist right's agenda. If a criminally self-serving candidate came along and parrotted the right's talking-points, he would receive the backing of the national GOP organization, get the benefit of their money and endorsement, and then when he gets elected, he can loot the public coffers. The scandal that would ensue in this scenario would destroy the Republican party as we know it, and maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. I'm kind of hoping Hoffman wins and turns out to be a radically incompetent representative.
i am sure acorn is laughing all the way to the election, and we are worried about obama being a socialist, how about consertaive really make this country a dicatorship.
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