Republicans aren't satisfied with grinding children under their heels. In this state we even stoop to beating up on a defenseless woman.
Today's Lee newspapers throughout the state carry a nice little piece that tells the story of how mean Republicans have stolen Linda McCulloch's domain name.
We have a big smiling picture of Ms. McCulloch (after all, she and her party are above all of this,) with the caption telling that "her domain name, www.lindamcculloch.com, was bought by Republicans, using a ploy some people are calling ‘political cyberfraud.’"
We're curious, for starters, how Gouras come to write this piece in the first place? Was it because of his tireless scouring of the web for such things, or did he get contacted by state Democrats about doing a puff-piece on Linda McCulloch? A back-story would be interesting.
And then we have Ms. McCulloch herself doing the "woe is me" routine, showing how mean the Republicans are, likening them to criminals:
"In this day and age of identity theft, taking somebody's name and using it without their permission seems kind of like going into their house without permission," McCulloch said.
Did the state GOP buy up the MuCulloch domain name and put their own information about her on it? Certainly they did.
But how did this article on this subject come to be written in the mainstream Montana media in October? And why does it take until the very end of the article for it to be mentioned that www.BobKeenan.com was taken by Democrats?
And why doesn't the article say that the Democratic party grabbed Keenan's domain name way back in July, when the first rumblings were being made about a possible Keenan run against Max Baucus?
Given the depths to which the Baucus campaign stooped during the last campaign, against Mike Taylor, this website was little more than a political warning of what Keenan and his family could expect should he dare to enter the race. Not that Dems are any more worried about Baucus losing in 2008 than they were in 2002 -- personal assassination of a trailing Republican Senate candidate is simply worth it if it allows them to redirect the Baucus war chest toward state legislative races.
Gouras must be a reporter who isn't paying attention, since the state's premier left-wing blog was bragging about Dems taking the Keenan domain name several months ago. One would think that the Keenan domain-name grab would have been even more newsworthy, since the Dems took out a domain name to put up a website trashing a private citizen who neither was in public office nor had declared candidacy for a public office.
Getting McCulloch's domain name appears to have been part 2 of a tit-for-tat that was initiated by the Democrats. But you wouldn't get that from Gouras's article.
So why does the GOP get the bad press, then: the headline, the first 3/4 of the article, the photo, and the photo caption? Reading the comments in the Gazette online edition, it seems that the take-home message for most readers was indeed that Republicans were the bad guys.
How much work would it have taken for Gouras to establish a timeline? Was there bias involved on his part, or was it just plain lazy and careless reporting by a paid professional who should know better?
Whatever the answers, it simply confirms us as Republicans in our conviction that every election we run is not just run against Democrats, but rather against a Democratic opposition that is aided by a press that is indifferent to the appearance of bias at best, and outright slanted against us at worst.
There really isn't a lot of practical difference between the two choices, at least as far as the guys on the receiving end are concerned. The fact that the press doesn't intend to be unfair is reassuring for the consciences of editors and reporters, but that is small comfort for those of us who have to live with the results at the ballot box.
But while we should never stop patiently pointing out the bias in this sort of piece, no matter how tiresome it gets, the flip side is that Republicans should place alongside their "Rather Biased" bumper stickers ones that say "No Whining."
Pointing out bias and correcting the record helps with the voting public. Thinking that doing so will stop biased reporting in the media, however, is a pipe-dream. It won't.
If we want to win elections, we need to counter the one-two punch of Democratic advertising and the Montana media with our own message taken directly to the voters.
We need to carry it to enough people to make up for outsourced opposition research and advertising like this particular AP article (again, whether it was meant as such or not is irrelevant from a practical standpoint.)
No one is going to help us but ourselves. Sounds like a conservative attitude, doesn't it?
