I’ve got a question about that anti-McDaniel flyer accusing the Tea Party of suppressing the black vote
Those of you who’ve followed the Republican primary in Mississippi are upset about Cochran’s outreach to Democrats. I agree it was a bad move. A great deal of the more intense anger about his campaign focuses on this abominable flyer supposedly put out by the Cochran forces:
I have a question: do you know who put out that flyer? I have found not one scintilla of information to tell me. It was not Cochran’s official campaign. It is not signed by any organization at all, not a PAC or anyone else.
Perhaps Cochran was indeed behind it—which would make his actions even worse, because the thing is awful. But I would like to know who’s behind it. Because when I first saw it, it immediately occurred to me that it is just the sort of thing the left would put out, for two purposes:
(1) They didn’t want to face the possibility of the more conservative candidate McDaniel winning the nomination and quite possibly the election; they’d rather work with the more moderate Cochran, so they would favor anything that would help nominate Cochran instead.
(2) Making people on the right think that Cochran put out the flyer would sow tremendous dissension within the Republican Party and hurt Cochran in the general if he had managed to win the nomination.
The flyer is a win/win for the left, and it wouldn’t have been an expensive operation at all. It also uses language that just happens to have the ring of the left, “The Tea Party intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday.” So I welcome any information about who actually put it out.
Again, it might indeed have been Cochran’s people, or supporters of him, which would have been dreadful. But at the moment I am very very suspicious that it may have other origins, and that, if so, the right is being played.
The activist game is the only social political game there is.
Eric:
Yes, and isn’t that exactly the reason conservatives should at least be curious about the origins of that flyer?
Good questions. A lot of manufactured controversies, I’m sure, because the Left knows exactly how to inflame every political, interest and victim group.
Cochran is the Robert Byrd of Mississippi. The bringer of influence and pork in massive quantities. So it could very likely be published by some black church either with or without the encouragement and support of the Cochran campaign and GOP. But it should be noted that Mississippi is next door to Louisiana and politics in both places is a contact sport.
I share your suspicions about the flyer’s origins, but of course I have no idea.
One thing I think we should learn from this controversy, though, is that flyers, brochures, and circulars are weirdly underused in modern politics. Everyone is so focused on high-tech communication that they seem to have forgotten that cheap paper brochures are one of the easiest ways to reach people who otherwise won’t be reached. They don’t even have to be mailed to people: they can just be left in public places or circulated informally. Think how weirdly successful Jack Chick has been with his religious tracts. Paper has an intimacy and immediacy that TV and the internet still can’t match.
I think this kind of “underground” media would be an ideal way to communicate not just slander (as in the case of the Cochran flyer) but substantive conservative arguments that aren’t likely to reach people through mass media. You can boil down arguments about federalism or citizenship rights into a few well-chosen words and acquaint people with ideas they’ve never considered before.
Mead; great idea.
I posted this on the other Cochran thread:
The flyer might be a false-flag operation.
But I think the real question is, how do we get the establishment Rinos to make a starboard course correction?
I’m thinking of Milton Friedman’s cheerfully cynical admonition that you can’t count on electing “good” men and expecting them to do the right thing – you need to set up the game so that it BEHOOVES our manifestly imperfect fellow bipeds to do the right thing.
We’re looking at a structural problem. There are too many incentives for corruption, pork-distributing, graft, and self-dealing, and not enough incentives for them to be upright All-American patriots.
The Founding Fathers had this figured, ergo the separation of powers to pit the scorpions against each other. Now that they’ve figured out how to join forces, we need another solution.
Ideas?
Remember the Dubai Ports controversy during Bush’s term? I always thought that was Schumer stirring the pot. He got a two-fer. He got to help out his longshoreman buddies and he got to damage Bush with Bush’s own supporters. If there’s one thing the Left knows how to do, it’s how to make us squeal. And we always seem to do so predictably, unfortunately.
Cochran could be confronted with the flyer and asked for an explanation by McDaniel’s camp.
McDaniel deserves to have the record set straight on these lies.
If Cochran denies any resposibility and maybe denounces it…..
I just dont know. Yes, they have to play that activist game and anticipate that the left is going to do this each and every time because it works.
People dont do their own research.
Reposting from the earlier thread:
If Cochran or those associated with him didn’t put out that offensive, divisive, and slanderous flyer, shouldn’t they be shouting it from the rooftops today?
All I hear is crickets.
Typical political tactics. It’s deniable. Nobody saw nothin’. Just like the IRS e-mails.
Did you all see this???
Now the EPA is claiming an employee “hard drive crash”:
EPA Refuses to Turn Over Subpoenaed Documents to Congress; Agency Explains That Some Subpoenaed Emails Were “Lost” In a “Hard Drive Crash” in 2010
(seen on Ace of Spades, with Flaming Skull)
kit; rickl:
I agree that Cochran should be made to address it. If he makes excuses for it and downplays it, he or someone behind him probably is responsible. If he denies it and/or condemns it, it could be a lie or it could be the truth.
I just think we have to be very very careful to attribute this flyer to him or his forces. As I said before, my gut says it’s from the left, because of the style and language.
Beverly,
Yes, I heard about the EPA computers.
Apparently no agencies in DC have computers that work. So of course they need more money 🙂 .
The tea party is kind of like Winston Churchill or Benjamin Netanyahu reduced to begging America’s assistance. But so they did. It might be instructive to view the two as a point of departure. The America of Churchill’s time, even with Roosevelt, was a different America and when the time came to resist tyranny, it did. Today? Well, has America helped Israel? Or isolated it. Israel’s response has been to rely on their own resources and other allies. Are we Churchill or Netanyahu?
Is it really better to vote a RINO rather than not vote or to actually vote a Democrat in? Could it be that voting RINO is a slower but more certain death and that refusing to vote RINO may, due to consequences we cannot see or predict, give us at least a small chance?
If everyone were Spock, and strictly logical, I’d say vote RINO and let time reveal the consequences. However, most people are not strictly logical and even less in politics; they are irrational and emotional. So the RINOs can count on losing a significant portion of their base. It seems the winning strategy of the Democrat Party never does this: it almost never panders to independents and moderates. But the tea party is asked to accept not moderates but collaborators in method and substance.
But then, what difference does sending a message to the RINOs make? They declared absolute war on the tea party and will lose rather than see a Tea Party person elected.
So were back to maybe it is better to put up with the RINOs and take what little they will oppose of the Democrats.
It’s not clear to me, mostly because I reject the pure rational model, which can predict the future. I say vote with your intelligence and heart, and if a candidate so disturbs your conscience, then don’t vote. And let the chips fall where they may.
neo-neocon Says:
June 25th, 2014 at 10:21 pm
Iowahawk tweeted, “My car in your living room means that I need a bigger bar tab.”
I think we are rapidly running out of time and space for that.
rickl:
I’m suggesting, though, that we try to make sure we don’t fall for the left’s activist game.
As for running out of time and space—we may have run out of both quite a while ago and not even realized it. Or we may have both time and space left. But if we give up, it’s as though we’ve run out of both, whether we have or not.
THIS Iowahawk tweet:
Apparently, the leading cause of hard drive failures is subpoenas.
There is an element of truth to the flyer. Mississippi has open primaries. You may vote in either party’s primary. However, once you do pick a ballot you are restricted to that party if there is a run off as in this case. If you did not vote in the initial primary, you are free to vote in the run-off contest for which ever party that might be. The only limitation is the voter is supposed to intend to vote for the party’s nominee in November.
In Mississippi there is a great deal of overlap between blacks and Democrats. In the first election the turn out for the Democrat candidate was light which means that there were lots of Democrats who did not vote in the initial primary. Cochran’s people figured out that there were lots of Democrats (blacks) who did not vote in the first contest and thus could vote for him. In a state where the Republican usually wins statewide elections, many Democrats would prefer Cochran over McDaniel. This caused the Cochran people to reach out to blacks assuming many are Democrats and may not have voted in the first election.
This is where things get ugly. The McDaniel people saw this coming and and said they were going to send poll watchers to precincts to discourage Democrats (read blacks) from voting. This is clear effort at voter suppression of blacks. Poll workers can’t ask people who they intend to vote for, especially if selected for questioning by race. That raises the issue of racial profiling. That made the McDaniel people look anti black which might have helped Cochran. There is no doubt that Democrats and blacks were decisive in the Cochran victory.
Suspicion is the watch word of the day, for evil knows no limits, certainly not the limit of human imagination.
Along with rickl, I will not hold my breath waiting for Cochran to dennounce the flyer and demand an investigation to discover the source. Cochran and the gop establishment openly sought dem crossover votes which in that state are mostly black voters. So first suspicion falls in their lap.
Weren’t there also robo-calls that made the same claims as the flyer? And if so, shouldn’t it be easy to track down the source of those calls?
OlderandWheezier:
It is my impression that robocalls are very hard if not impossible to trace. That’s the info I got when I quickly Googled it.
Someone else might know more about that than I, but that’s what I’ve read.
While McDaniel is a conservative and supported by many conservative groups, he is also a loose cannon who would have received a withering attack in the media as other tea party senate candidates and Sarah Palin have (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Delaware). His Democrat opponent is conservative and has a good record as a former Congressman. He is electable if the Republican gets destroyed. Cochran’s victory is critical in the attempt to retake the Senate.
A Democrat is going to retake the Senate from Democrat demons like Reid.
What are people smoking with their ObamaCare subsidies these days.
Being elected in the REpublican primary by Democrat voters is worse than being a Sarah Palin on the national stage. People think traitors in the back are fluffy bunnies compared to the Democrats in the Senate.
Mr. Frank Says:
June 25th, 2014 at 11:24 pm
Retake the Senate for whom?
Mr Frank: you are making the argument for why the Democrats would have preferred to face McDaniel rather than Cochran.
Maybe the man on the grassy knoll put out the flyers. Follow the money. The republicans wanted Cochran, the dems would rather have their guy, Childers.
Mr. Frank,
What makes you think:
A) the pubics want to take the Senate and remove that excuse doing nothing
B) even if they do, that they will fight the weaponized .gov
I don’t think you guys are voting your way out. I say you guys because I don’t vote anymore. In fact nobody in my immediate family does.
If that message worked, it’s because too many blacks already believe it anyway. Or things like that.
The tea party is associated with shutting down their government jobs, or their welfare, or their affirmative action, indirectly if not directly. Lower taxes is not the first thing the black caucas cares about.
They are suspicious anyway. It was easy to push them in that direction.
We need more “whackco birds” to counter the likes of McCain and Cochran. We need more Sessions, Cruzes, Lees, Gowdys, and Gohmerts. We don’t need more get along rinos. We need trench fighters. We need people with a spine who do not wilt and curry favor from the MSM.
The activist game really isn’t the only game in town — there’s also celebrity endorsement. And in the case of Cochran, it’s just possible it was the ad by Mississippi native and legendary NFL quarterback Brett Favre that made the difference.
Here’s the ad; I can see how it might be a game changer.
1) Likely you’ll never know who made it.
2) Doesn’t matter. Dems or Cochran, both are corrupt.
Ann: and Haley Barbour just pardoned Favre’s brother a little while ago.
I think this a kind of nutty thread, wanting/demanding to know who put out the false crap in MS. There was no ID on it for a reason. Yeah, let’s just demand Cochran tell us whence it came,,,that’s nutty too. And then we have the people watching MS (right next to LA) from afar claiming politics are contact sports there or something, like politics is clean and mannerly and sans corruption in KY or MA or WI or MN or NY….that’s nutty too. Up in the grand places corruption is in $billions; in the South it’s still $millions by and large.
Too many of you don’t know that Jackson MS, the state capitol, is >>50% black, and until recently had a mayor born in Deetroit who renamed himself Chokwe Lumumba after the”great” african communist of the Congo in the ’60s. He ate himself to death as mayor; took only a few months.
MS is bordered on the North by Memphis TN, Memphis is approx 67% black and is represented by
Rep. Cohen, a Jewish white brother whose craven politics are mercifully free of moral principles.
In MS Democrat is synonymous with black. There is the Jefferson County seat of Fayette, which in the last census had approx 2500 residents, 40 of whom were white; most of the rest live on the porches of their public housing watching others of their ilk. The are all fat on govt support, and the town is beloved by trial lawyers in corp damage cases because the jury verdicts are always more than the misbegotten lawyers themselves seek. All jurors are porch sitters unless sitting in the jury box. They have the Powah!
I’ve been thru Fayette. Not far from Fayette is the (ahem) “historically black Alcorn State University” best known for its famous Dyno-Mite Marching Band. Median ACT score Math 17, English 17, 6 year graduation rate 38%
So you’re gonna have ol’ Thad fess up, huh?
Don Carlos:
Don’t be silly. I don’t expect anyone to fess up, ever; it’s mostly a rhetorical question, the point of which is that people should consider an alternative explanation. Look at the flyer and make up your own minds where it came from, because no one will ever own up to it. My gut reaction at the outset was that this was a leftist operation. That could be wrong, of course.
neo,
First I’d like to give you props for actually reading the comments of those who post on your blog and interacting with them. I often forget how unique that is, unique to the point of extraordinary. Thank you for allowing, in my case, a spirited defense of my opinions. The numbers of blogs I read where the owner interacts with their readers is so minimal as to approach zero.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
Here’s my problem and why I don’t care if the poster and robo-calls were a Democrat false flag operation or Cochrane was being a typical RINO jackass.
The eGOPs, by their loathing and constant denigrating of the TEA Party, have created the atmosphere wherein I believe Cochrane put out the flyer and ordered the robo-calls made. They’ve created the situation where, to quote Issa, ‘I don’t believe you’. They have no one but themselves to blame for my lack of trust in them, in what they do, in what they say. When the base of a political party gets to that point that, to me, signals the death knell of said political party.
So it doesn’t matter who put out this poster. The fact that it fits right in with eGOPs’ thinking is all that matters to me. They are guilty by their own execrable actions toward those who support and vote for them. Sad. But like I said in the other thread, we no longer have two parties with differing philosophies of governance but rather one party with two sects: One big government sect takes a faster road to Perdition and while the other big government sect takes a slower road to Perdition. We end up in Perdition in either case.
The language of the flyer is definitely Lefty. The sociopathic sneakiness of it is, too, very much so. McDaniel may have signed a pledge not to run as an independent or candidate for another party. However if he can legally do so, he ought to do just that. Might throw the election to the Democrat? There are already Republicans threatening to vote Dem anyway, not just here, but in Mississippi. If investigations trace the buyers of radio ad time to Cochran, I think McDaniel has a chance. RINO’s are not our only problem, and corrupt judges appointed by Dems are surely a huge threat, but we must act strategically, with our heads pulled free from our nether parts. Someone admonished us to be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. I am pretty sure that Republicans get the dove part, maybe too much. We need desperately to work on that wise thing.
Bush did it 🙂
All conservatives should vote for the Democrat in the general election and donate money to the Democrat’s campaign.
If the GOPe is going to use the same Alinsky tactics as the left then conservatives should burn the house down.
Radio ad for Cochran says that tea party will take away food stamps.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10204276736947315
Harold:
That’s quite a “solution.”
Punish the entire GOP for what some members do, and at the same time reward the Democrats, who stand for everything you hate.
Way to go!
Does anyone know where Rove was when this first came out?
You’re correct that there is no known link between this flyer and Cochran, and I was wrong to assume that in an earlier comment.
Gateway Pundit has another flyer with messaging along the same lines (http://tinyurl.com/kro746q) that is clearly identified as coming from All Citizens for Mississippi PAC. According to the NYT, this PAC was recently created by Jacqueline Vann, CFO of the New Horizon Church International in Jackson. From another of their flyers it appears that they are a Dem-leaning group:
“The decision on who is going to be our next senator is going to be made in the republican primary.We’re asking democrats to cross over and vote in the republican primary to ensure our community’s interest is heard.”
To further muddy the waters, the Haley Barbour-supported Mississippi Conservatives Super PAC hired a Democrat political operative, James “Scooby Doo” Warren, to get the black vote for Cochran. There are allegations that it was more like vote buying (who knows if that is true).
While I doubt that the All Citizens for Mississippi PAC made the mystery flyer (because they were already distributing something similar), one wonders if the Dem operative hired by the Mississippi Conservatives Super PAC may have done it. Especially since it looks like the typical Democrat dirty trick. That the establishment GOP was willing to use this Dem operative to win is disappointing enough w/out proof that Warren had a hand in that flyer.
Lizzy:
Yes, Cochran was foolish to ally with Democrats and think it was a good idea. Not only did it alienate a lot of conservatives, but the Democrats may have found a way to help him in the primary and then screw him in the general. Nice going.
It’s really the only solution.
The GOPe are statists so don’t really stand for restoring the Founding principles of the country.
Does anyone actually think they’d eliminate the department of Education or any other department.
Does anyone really think that they’d repeal Obamacare, root and branch.
Does anyone think they’d really pass a fair tax or flat tax.
Does anyone think they’d impeach Obama, or Holder or any of a dozen or more other officials violating their oath of office.
Does anyone think they’d completely close the southern border.
Does anyone think they’d enact the Penney plan, freezing the federal budget for five years to achieve a balanced budget.
In actuality given how conservative the state is it is likely that a large cohort of Republicans will stay home or vote libertarian, something not much different from voting for the Dem in the general election.
In Connecticut Republicans voted Lieberman into office when he ran as an Independent to punish the radical Dems in the state, in the process abandoning the Republican candidate. Again not much different then my solution.
Depriving the GOPe of power is the only way to change the party.
Heard on the Limbaugh show that it’s coming out now that the flyer and robo calls were put out by Dem agents provocateurs.
So Neo was right. The Republicans, and the blacks of Mississippi, have been punked by the Pinkos again.
Here’s a false flag operation. Dress up as Islamic Jihad and Left wing groups, then kidnap reporters and ransom them.
No denial from Cochran, and his buddy Lindsay Graham says he’s pleased to hear that African-Americans turned out to vote for “Thad.”
The right is getting played all right – by our own side.
Even if the flyers were put out by lefty groups it doesn’t absolve Cochran. His camp could have solicited Dem help with a wink and nod; Dems put the word out to their operatives with the desired message who then put out the flyers. Bonus help from poll workers in Dem-heavy precincts looking the other way when Dem primary voters show up.
Again, no denial from the Cochran people tells you all you need to know.
Porchlight:
The right is getting played by both sides.
But it’s the left who are the better and more vicious players.
It’s a matter of priorities. The Islamic Jihad cannot be defeated, unless the enemy at home is eliminated first. Fact. The enemy closer to our supply lines needs to be eliminated first, not last, because logistically, no war can be had to the finish without logistical replenishment.
The same is true with Left vs Republicans. If the Left could be defeated without Republicans, that should be the priority. However, if the priority is to grab the Republican assets needed to defeat the Left, then Republicans must be prioritized ahead of the later strategic objectives, once resources have flowed in.