I manage the campaign of Ron Shepston in CA-42. This post does not address, or otherwise represent, that campaign. Instead, it's about CA-44, one of our neighboring districts that is also part of the "Triangle of Corruption" represented by Gary Miller (CA-42), Ken Calvert (CA-44), and Jerry Lewis (CA-41).
On Sunday, someone whom I think we can assume was a GOP smear operative (high UID with no previous diary or comment history) posted a troll diary on Daily Kos. You can read it here. This was a scurrilous and baseless attack on Bill Hedrick, the candidate who has raised the most money, leaving open the inference that it was posted by a supporter of 2006 nominee Louis Vandenberg. The diary quickly rose to the top of the Google charts for Bill Hedrick, which suggests that it was part of a Republican Googlebombing strategy.
What did Hedrick and Vanderberg do after this attack? They showed true class and cooperated in producing a joint statement that appeared today on DKos.
The CA-44 joint statement has been scrolling down the list today and only received four comments. So (despite the temptation to write about the Kucinich-Cheney situationn) I'm going to use my diary today to thank these two men.
If you haven't read them yet, please do.
Because I am working on a neighboring campaign, there's a sense in which my candidate is in competition with both Hedrick and Vandenberg for attention, money, volunteer time, and the like. Let me echo the generous spirit in which they have acted with their joint statement by saying: to hell with that. I am honored to be part of the same network of Southland Democratic challengers and campaigns as they are. I hope to have their back, and the back of anyone else similarly situated, when the GOP slime machine raises its head, and I hope to hear the same from them.
Or political opponents include desperate and rotten people, and if we can't stop them from telling lies, we can at least make their doing so painful and counterproductive. Public support for both of these men, who compete in one sense and cooperate in another, is the only way to show these oh-so-clever GOP slimeballs that their efforts will blow up in their faces, as they have done across the country. I hope you'll join me in expressing that solidarity. If you're inclined to do so with cash -- to one or even to both -- great. Include the $.01 so they know where it came from.
And if anyone out there with the capacity to link would like to do a little counter-Googlebombing of your own, please link both to this diary and to the one they posted. If searches on "Bill Hedrick" and "Louis Vandenberg" point to this explanation of GOP perfidy above all else, we'll have some unhappy GOP operatives, and that makes me smile.
UPDATE: Tune in here to enjoy all of the ingenious stylings of this GOP troll. He doesn't even seem to be pretending anymore.