On Wednesday, Oct. 8, Representative Jean Schmidt was injured, reportedly when hit by a car while jogging near her home in Miami Township, Ohio, at 5:45 am. The extent of her injuries was not publicly known until yesterday, when Schmidt complained of severe pain and then lost consciousness at a US Air Force base in Germany, en route to a planned visit to Afghanistan, which has been cancelled. Doctors have now discovered that the congresswoman suffers from two broken ribs and two fractured vertebrae.
There is no snark whatsoever in this report. Facts of the Schmidt injury are as reported in today's Portsmouth Daily Times and Chillicothe Gazette. I'm sure that Schmidt's injuries are real and painful, and I wish her a speedy recovery.
But as with all things Schmidtian, there are a number of things about this story that raise legitimate questions. More below the fold.
Let's start with Schmidt's account of the hit-and-run crime from the police report, as reported in the Daily Times:
I saw a car approaching. The driver appeared to be very close to the road's edge. The driver kept getting closer. I moved into the grass and realized the driver was going to hit me. So I turned my back to the car. He hit me, and it threw me into the ditch.
According to the Daily Times, "she said she did not see the driver clearly but it appeared to be a man."
There is a big problem here. Schmidt claims the car approached her coming head-on, and only at the last minute did she turn her back to absorb the impact. But 5:45 am on October 8 was at least an hour before sunrise in Miami Township. Meaning, it was dark, and the car had its headlights on. If Jean Schmidt was hit in the dark by an oncoming vehicle with it headlights on, how could she possibly see that the driver "appeared to be a man"?
Obviously, she could not. Nor is it likely that her last reflex would be to turn her back. Schmidt is a limber individual who regularly runs in marathons. Her last reflex would be to jump.
The facts as reported suggest a different scenario -- that the car was headed in her same direction and hit the congresswoman from the back, without her ever seeing it coming, and while she still was running on the roadside.
Why would Schmidt alter the facts in her report? Because the likely actual scenario finds her sharing fault -- she was running on the wrong side of the road in the dark. On the contrary, her fabricated version strongly implies that the hit was intentionally directed. She says that a car came at her face with headlights on and even followed her off the road to strike her. Her version makes her the victim of an attempted assassination, rather than a partcipant in an unfortunate accident.
In her version, rather than sharing fault, she's the victim of a murder attempt, just as she unselfishly plans to leave the capaign trail to visit US troops overseas. How positively heroic, and how conveniently it would keep her in office, when polls were increasingly looking bad.
If she did alter the facts for her police report, it would explain why Schmidt did not seek proper diagnosis of her injuries while in the USA -- she did not want forensic examination of the details. Two broken ribs and two fractured vertebrae and those were not found on medical examination following the accident? With congressional medical insurance? And then the congresswoman takes off for Germany and Afghanistan in the midst of a hotly contested reelection campaign?
Ms. Schmidt also did not go to the US Air Force base hospital -- rather, she went to a local German hospital. That socialized medicine is so superior, don'tcha know. (Her principal opponent is Democrat Vic Wulsin, a medical doctor whose main issue is health care. Schmidt's choice of care would seem to constitute a concession.)
If this all sounds a bit too Perry Masonish, remember it's the OH-02 district we are talking about. Schmidt has already been caught red-handed, so to speak, plagiarizing text for a newpaper op-ed column, lying about having a second college degree she does not have, and giving sponsored bills titles that contradict the body of the legislation. (Her "Nuclear Waste Storage Prohibition Act" would actually have facilitated spent nuclear fuel storage in her district, at the Piketon site.)
There is an even more suspicious precedent for this event. At the exact same point in the 2006 Schmidt-Wulsin contest, Schmidt also became a "victim" in a way that elicited voter sympathies, perhaps accounting for her 1.5 point victory margin.
Just after the revelation that Schmidt supported the Piketon spent fuel storage plan, a "Piketon resident" appeared on the scene, claiming to be a "pro-Life, pro-gun Democrat," asking voters to support him as a write-in candidate for the OH-02 seat. Though originally from the area, Nate Noy had been living in Chicago until his write-in bid, and he disappeared from OH-02 immediately after the election.
The sole basis of Noy's "campaign" consisted of hurling ridiculously nutty charges at Schmidt, given front-page play in our local papers. He accused Schmidt of "trading places" with her identical twin, so the twin could cast votes in Congress. And he accused Schmidt of doctoring marathon photographs to shave minutes off her finish time.
These absurdities were actually very clever interventions. The allegations were easily refuted, Wulsin's serious challenge was knocked off the front page of the papers, and Schmidt was able to portray herself as the victim of an organized smear campaign. Sympathy got Jean Schmidt reelected in 2006.
A bit of research on Nate Noy revealed his true aim as facilitating that reelection. His job in Chicago had been "Government Affairs Director" for the International Warehouse Logistics Association, a trade group that represents "the warehousing and storage industry." In that job, he had given Jean Schmidt a 100% positive rating. IWLA very much wanted the Piketon spent fuel storage project to succeed.
So the sympathy induction game worked well to divert voters' attention and get Schmidt reelected in 2006. Why not try it again this year?
UPDATE 1: I apologize for not providing links earlier; I was working with hard copy of the newspapers. The original report of the incident where her chief of staff Barry Bennett was quoted a saying "Other than being sore, she's fine. There was no bleeding, no broken bones. She was lucky,"
is at http://www.portsmouth-dailytimes.com...
Note that Portsmouth Daily Times reporter Sam Piatt is a veteran employee of the Piketon uranium enrichment plant. Be aware that the Daily Times removes stories quickly from online so the link will cease to work.
Tuesday's AP story in which the injuries were discovered, in Germany, to be quite serious, can be found at http://news.cincinnati.com/...
AP did not carry the earlier story, so the great majority of readers did not get to see the huge discrepancy in accounts. In both cases the political spin is obvious: At first she was "only sore" and "lucky" so as to imply no interruption of the campaign. Five days later, Schmidt was badly injured and the implied victim of a murder attempt. What happened in the intervening time? Barack Obama appeared at a huge rally in Portsmouth with Vic Wulsin.
UPDATE 2: I am accused of "speculating." Well, since none of us was at the scene, we all are reduced, by definition, to speculation. Taking Schmidt's various accounts at face value is equally speculative, and, arguably, on the basis of her record, less justifiable.
The important distinction is whether our speculation is idle or not. In this case, logical analysis leads to non-idle lines of inquiry that should be pursued by journalists and the police. If Schmidt's account is credible, the police ought to be investigating this as an attempted assassination, not just a hit-and-run. Are they? If not, why do the police doubt Schmidt's account? Was there evidence at the scene of the car leaving the pavement? On what side of the road did this occur?
Why did the alleged X-rays in Ohio miss all four breaks and fractures? Will Schmidt release her German medical records so voters can judge the veracity of her story?
Why and when did "the Pentagon request" that Schmidt travel to Afghanistan in the middle of a reelection campaign? That smells more fishy than a sushi bar after a power outage. How many other endangered Republicans have been sent on national security assignment to Afghanistan in October before a congressional election?
Finally, we must distinguish between sympathy for the pain felt by accident victims and trust in the reliability in their accounts. One does not imply the other. Anyone with real-world experience with the justice system (or watching a lot of cop shows will do) knows that victims and witnesses often lie. Two common motives for lying are avoidance of blame and the seeking of profit from misfortune. Here, both those motives exist aplenty.