We interrupt our coverage for a special report.
As we enter the two week mark of the hostage crisis, the propaganda and rhetoric by the freedom fighters only gets turned up. Now, the McDaniel camp has lawyered up with trial lawyer Mitch Tyner to representing him on the voting effort. Interesting that voting law and election disputes are not listed along with Baycol, Pondimin and Airline Crashes as areas of his firm’s expertise. But we digress.
Yesterday, the YP Memory division dug up Mitch Tyner’s 2003 gubernatorial campaign site (that’s still active, by the way). It turns out that front and center on his campaign site is a grip-and-grin picture with none other than . . . Thad Cochran. The other interesting thing on the site was a listing of a press release that said that Tyner immediately endorsed Haley Barbour after losing the primary to him (83-17%).
Here’s a video of the presser from yesterday.
As the old saying goes, when you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose. The McDaniel camp seems to have absolutely nothing to lose and apparently there are no consequences for casting aspersions on the party’s election process or Joe Nosef and the Executive Committee of the MS Republican Party. That’s really who McDaniel is
attacking the most when he asserts that there were illegal voters. McDaniel enunciates that in his interview with WLOX yesterday. Time and again, he continues to thumb his nose at Joe Nosef and the GOP because there appears to be no consequences for saying whatever they feel helps them regardless of the price to the state or the party. And there appears to be absolutely no effort or concern on behalf of the campaign to keep their troops in line.
WLOX.com – The News for South Mississippi
The lack of party discipline is allowing just the faintest bit of oxygen to keep the embers glowing and people from across the political spectrum are taking potshots at the MSGOP because there appears to be absolutely no consequence in doing it. Nature abhors a vacuum and that vacuum is being filled with emotionally charged people saying unbalanced and unsubstantiated things.
Case in point, Ted Cruz last night on Mark Levin’s show talked about the “seriousness of the allegations” and the need to get to the bottom of it. Mighty rich for a sitting senator who passed on getting involved with the Tea Party in Mississippi. He also called appealing to black voters “appalling”. MS Democratic Chair Rickey Cole is hopping on board with Cruz and McDaniel stoking the flames as well. It’s appalling to him too, but for a totally different reason.
Again, this craziness lives and breathes because the party hasn’t come down with real resolution and said, “This thing is over and we’re moving on to focus on winning in November.”
The bottom line is that the McDaniel camp and its confederation of interest groups seem to be throwing around numbers that so far have not been substantiated with any proof. There absolutely has to be a price paid for batting around errant assertions at the expense of the reputation of the party by a party candidate. As we’ve said before, the ship needs to get righted and quickly. Again, someone’s gonna win and someone’s going to lose. Everyone’s going to need to pick sides and get on with it. Waiting a month from now (or longer) for a judge to do it ain’t going to make it any better or leave feelings any less bruised. There seems to be precious little acknowledgement from the leaders of the Republican party publicly that the people have voted and that it’s now time to move on.
One last thought . . . if one took McDaniel’s argument to its conclusion and he got the relief he was seeking, namely to invalidate the election based on thousands of African American voters voting in a Republican primary (which having black participation in the Republican Party is a great thing by the way), can you imagine the backlash and implications for Mississippi nationally or the circus that would ensue? Wrap your brain around that.
Elections have consequences. Votes have been counted and though there are some wild-eyed zealots making all sorts of allegations, there doesn’t appear to be the first bit of real impropriety that’s been documented. And I promise if McDaniel had any real info of impropriety in hand, he’d be letting it fly and not offering to pay $1000 per accusation. No one has brought any proof forth whatsoever to substantiate this circus that’s being allowed to roll on. In fact, from the actual numbers that have been released, it looks like any issues are extremely minor and clerical in nature.
That’s the way it was – Day 14 of the McDaniel Hostage Crisis.
Good day Mississippi – and good luck.
