| Vic Sprouse, West Virginia's best known owner of overly priced "fitness centers" for ladies, is claiming credit for killing the "Not Gary Abernathy" movement even though he was the one doing the most to publicize it, an effort to slide a proverbial dagger in Abernathy's back.
The fight was between the Republicans over Abernathy's appointment as executive director so we watched from the sidelines.
The former Republican consultant Sprouse wore his heart on his sleeve longing for the executive director job state party chairman Doug McKinney gave to Abernathy.
Here's what I wrote before on it:
As former GOP Senate Minority Leader and political consultant Vic Sprouse wrote the other day it's enough to create sympathy for them and he urged his people to stop.
Sprouse, by the way, seems to be going out of his way to try to calm the flames by dousing them with buckets of gasoline. With Sprouse you can never tell if he's being his usual stupid self and being unintentionally inflammatory towards McKinney and Abernathy by highlighting the anti-McKinney and anti-Abernathy people's remarks or if he's being conniving and sneaky for his own motives.
Here's from Abernathy's blog:
Why? Here's my favorite line from Vic's blog: "Gary is getting bashed for being a bad consultant. I'm not sure what that has to do with being ED." Geesh!
I've already busted Vic (jokingly) by email for agreeing that I was a bad consultant. He responded with an "LOL" and said he didn't mean to make it sound that way. Hmmm.
Now before you tell me that Sprouse can't be stupid and clever at the same time, just remember this is Sprouse we're talking about. He was dumb enough to end what many Republicans thought was a bright political future by committing serial adultery while campaiging as a family values politician. But remember he was sneaky and conniving enough to convince many of those soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Vic Sprouses that she was the only one for him. So is Sprouse trying to be a peace maker and just really awful at it or is he trying to fan the flames because he's angling for something and hopes to come out ahead once everyone else is destroyed?
But here's something interesting and rather telling on Sprouse's blog. In his latest post on the issue titled: "Not Gary Abernathy is dead?" about the movement to oust Abernathy from his new role, the url is www.changewv.com/2009/gary-abernathy-is-dead. (emphasis mine).
Those urls are usually the first words of a post. But his url isn't "Not Gary Abernathy is dead." A Freudian slip on Sprouse's part or is his computer picking up the subliminal messages Sprouse wants to send?
How much did Sprouse do his best to slide the dagger into Abernathy's back? The Not Gary Abernathy web site and its commentors made all kinds of personal attacks and claims about Abernathy - the kind of claims we never wrote about nor reported because they weren't relevant. (Hey, if Sprouse didn't make such a big issue out of being a family values kind of guy and how letting teh gheys have the right to marry like anyone else would ruin the sanctity of marriage we'd never bring up his 22 marriages ending because of his serial adultery.) But at the time Sprouse wrote about the attacks, few people had heard of the "Not Gary Abernathy" blog. Sprouse has one of the more popular blogs for rightwingers in the state. If Sprouse hadn't directed people to the Not Gary Abernathy site and highlighted all the terrible comments made about Abernathy while "tsk tsking" them, who would have ever heard of the allegations or the "Not Gary Abernathy" movement other than a handful of people?
Sprouse even could have mentioned the site and how terrible commenters there were, but instead he went into specifics that helped draw even more attention to what they claimed.
So it's funny to see Sprouse claimed that he killed the campaign when he probably gave it more life than nearly any one else.
By the way, I've got as much claim, if not more, than Sprouse does in having stopped the anti-Gary Abernathy movement.
I know this will make Clem mad since he tells me all the time I've been too nice to Abernathy of late unlike the old days on the site before the new and nicer Carnacki appeared. (I'll criticize Abernathy's politics, but he seems a decent guy who puts his heart into it even though I think his heart is missplaced.)
Back on Jan. 6, I asked "Is Capito's campaign behind the anti-Gary Abernathy movement?"
I think after I wrote that many people began to realize that it wasn't just a grass roots campaign of Republican activists angry at McKinney's selection of Abernathy. He didn't consult them, but when did that many GOP activists ever worry their party is run strictly as a top down organization. It's all about the authority in the GOP. Rather it was an effort organized and led behind the scenes by someone with a specific agenda either for his candidate, Shelley Moore Capito, to make sure only people beholden to her run the state GOP and not people who look out for the welfare of the GOP organization overall. Capito doesn't want to have to deal with people in the rank and file who might want former Sec'y of State Betty Ireland to run against her. In addition, as I pointed out, the person I suspect behind it all has his own personal ambitions to run both Abernathy and Sprouse out of the political consulting business in West Virginia. With so few Republicans in office in the state, the competition is cut throat and when were Republicans ever known for playing nice when their own money is involved?
This is speculation on my part, but I suspect what killed the "Not Gary Abernathy" push is people realized it drew too much negative attention to Capito and someone playing with fire behind the scenes got burned when he was exposed to the heat his effort generated. |
