More gutter politics from Spike

by: heath_harrison

Sat Mar 20, 2010 at 05:36:19 AM EDT

Barely over a month into his candidacy and disgraced judge Elliott "Spike" Maynard has dragged the race into the sewer.

Perhaps he's feeling encouraged by the wall-to-wall discredited smear ads run by out-of state Republican operatives on local television to help him out.

Maynard recently attacked Rep. Nick Rahall for his past efforts to help uninsured Americans get health care coverage, and demanded that the Congressman take a stand before the final version of the bill had been released:

Rahall fired back, citing the scandal that cost Maynard his spot on the bench and led to the ex-judge's decision to come out of the Republican closet:

"I think responsible individuals would want me to undertake my responsibilities as a member of Congress to discern what it is I'm voting on," he said. "It's like a judge using integrity. You can't base it on drinking Kool-Aid on the French Riviera. You've got to base it on facts. You've got to hear all the facts before you render a decision."

"I'm surprised that Rahall would go that low," Maynard said. "And the public isn't interested in issues like that or whether Rahall had lunch with a guy like Yasser Arafat or went to Baghdad to try to meet with Saddam Hussein, or whether he constantly had lunch with Arab oil sheikhs. We could make the election about stuff about like, but the public's health care is at stake and coal miners jobs are at stake."

I thought the public seemed quite interested in "issues like that" on May 14, 2008, but what do I know?

A word about Rahall's trip to Iraq, from a 2002 article in The Nation:

So much of official Washington was caught by surprise when the West Virginia Democrat appeared before the Iraqi Assembly Sunday "as a member of Congress concerned with peace" and declared, "Basically, I want America and Iraq to give peace a chance."

"Instead of assuming that war must come, let us find ways to discover how to prove that war is unnecessary," Rahall told the Iraqis. "It is time and, in my opinion, far past time that American and Iraqi officials talk to each other without threats."

[...]
Rahall said he also was making the trip because of his doubts about whether the Bush administration has made a case for waging war against Iraq at this time.

"Why now, two months before an election? Why was the threat so serious now that it wasn't a year ago. I've seen certainly no link of Iraq to 9/11," Rahall said. "I just don't see a linkage there."

Of course, Rahall, like many who opposed the war in Iraq (and were demonized in the media at the time), was eventually proven right.

The flimsy case the Bush administration made was based on pure B.S. There were no WMDs. There was no link between Iraq and 9/11 and Saddam wasn't a threat to the U.S.

Rahall's effort to use diplomacy to prevent his country from going down the path toward an unnecessary war is one of the finest moments of his congressional career.

Unfortunately, the nation didn't listen to voices like Rahall and Senator Byrd, and instead embarked on a foreign policy blunder that would cost hundreds of billions, kill thousands of Americans and Iraqis and divert resources from capturing Bin Laden.

Yet here we are in 2010, and Maynard is resurrecting these tired attacks in an attempt to excuse himself from scandal.

Maynard would have you believe the fact that he was sneaking around on European vacation with one of the parties with business before his court is somehow equivalent to Rahall's very public mission for peace.

The man truly has no sense of shame - and that's why this will likely be the first of many thinly-veiled attacks on the ethnic heritage of Rahall, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants.

Blankenship/Maynard backers are already testing the strategy out.

Both the wingnut West Virginia Watchdog and former Blankenship operative Roman Stauffer's site have repeatedly tried to distort reality to paint Rahall as having terrorist ties.

This is all they have, along with baseless hysteria about a non-existent War on Coal^TM and blatantly lying and pulling numbers out of thin air.

In order to succeed, Blankenship and Maynard have to invent a scenario in which  a 33-year public servant who has used his seniority in the House majority to consistently advocate for West Virginia needs to be replaced by a corrupt and rejected tool of special interests.

There's simply no truthful or dignified way to make that case, and that's why Maynard's campaign has been based on negativity and dishonesty from day one.

----

Bonus scumbaggery: And if none of that works, Maynard can just rely on his hope that West Virginians have no basic reasoning skills, as he  did when he issued this stupid gem last week on global warming:

"Carbon Dioxide is the stuff you exhale. I suppose we should have a regulation that says you can't breathe. I don't think we need to make fundamental changes in public policy until we do know for sure [about global warming], and right now, nobody knows."