Dirty Tricks

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah for a Conservative to complain about Democratic dirty tricks, given that we live in the age of Rove. It takes double-chutzpah to do so the day after news came out that James Tobin, who tried to jam Democratic get out the vote efforts (this would be, in fact, a dirty trick), had talked to people in the White House dozens of times while doing his dirty deed. And yet that is what Dustin Haskins has chosen to write his latest article about.

Essentially the dirty trick he is complaining about is one played by, at last count, one Democrat. Apparently this enterprising young Democrat set up a website as a Republican, claiming he was fed up with the Republican Party and was considering not voting at all or going Democratic.

Curious about the e-mail, I began a back-and-forth emailing with the “grassroots conservative,” pretended to agree with him, and two days later it became painfully obvious that he was far from a grassroots conservative. When I called the blogger out on his bogus scheme, he responded only with: “Win some, lose some.” The election games have begun.

We'll have to see if this guy has ties to, say, the Senate Minority Leaders office or the DNC.

But that's not really the point of this article I suspect. It's pretty clear to me that there is discontent in the Republican Party right now. The Social/Religious conservatives got Alito, but they still have to put up with abortion and open homosexuality. The Fiscal conservatives got tax cuts, but no spending cuts to go along with them. The Neo-Conservatives got to invade Iraq, but on the other hand, they got to invade Iraq. So it's entirely believable that we are going to see more complaints by Conservatives over the next couple of months leading up to the election.

Hawkins doesn't want Republicans to take such complaints seriously, and, presumably, he doesn't want to have to take them seriously himself. So he's crafted a back door to such complaints; when they pop up, they are probably the work of dirty trickster Democrats. Certainly that must be a comforting thing to believe, but I'm not convinced it is going to actually pan out.