DOUBLING DOWN ON DUMB

Original ideas seem to be beyond the capability of the Democrats first-string candidates for Congress this year. 

First, Harry Reid’s hand-picked senate candidate, John Walsh, imploded when it was discovered that he had plagiarized his master’s thesis from the War College in 2007.  The New Your Times’ explosive piece, that came to light a scant few weeks after the primary election, eventually resulted in the beaten and bloody sure-thing incumbent senator tucking his tail between his legs and riding into the sunset.  That left the Montana Democrat Party frantically scrambling for a replacement candidate from an array of has-beens, losers, and untested wannabees. 

Meanwhile, back in the race for Montana’s only House seat, the democrats’ phantom candidate, John Lewis (“Lewis who?”), was desperately trying to get a little traction and attention from the press and the voters.  After noticing all the coverage that Walsh got in July and August while he was sucking hind tit, Lewis apparently took away a lesson that maybe wasn’t the smartest thing he could have come up with. 

Last week, in a big event that almost nobody noticed, John rolled out his fantastic, new, exciting, ta-da, plan to “clean up congress.”  Part and parcel of this brilliant idea is the proposal that members of Congress shouldn’t be paid until they pass a budget.  Wow.  Just wow. 

Earth to John.  If you’re going to plagiarize key elements of your campaign platform the last place you should “borrow” from is the current Republican congressman.  Steve Daines introduced his first bill, the Balanced Budget Accountability Act in February of 2013, which called for a pay cut if Congress didn’t pass a balanced budget, and he co-sponsored the No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013, which – you guessed it - required both chambers of Congress to pass a budget by April 15, 2013 or the salaries of Members of that chamber would be withheld.  By the way, the bill passed both houses and was signed into law by the president.

So let me help you out, John:

Plagiarize  [pley-juh-rahyz, -jee-uh-rahyz]   

verb

:  to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own:  use (another's production) without permission or crediting the source 

We know it can get you a lot of press coverage, John, but you should have paid better attention:  Plagiarism can be a real bummer for a campaign.  

 

Guest Post from MT City Girl

NEW BOX – SAME OLD SOAP

“New!!!”  “Improved!!!!”  “Cleans Better – Gets Clothes Whiter!!!!”  “Eliminates Fine Lines and Wrinkles!!!”  How many times have you fallen for the hype – only to find out that the whites aren’t whiter, the colors aren’t brighter and those damn wrinkles are still staring back at you in the morning?  Anybody over the age of twelve knows that the only thing that changed was the package – it’s the same old product.  But we fall for the gimmick anyway, time and time again.  We want the magic whiteners and wrinkle removers so badly that we let our hope triumph over our head.

We do the same with our political candidates too.  We keep believing the hoopla.  In 2008, Americans bought into the promise of hope and change with a vengeance!  We just knew that the new guy was going to make everything better and brighter – the economy, the Middle East, racial tensions, immigration, cronyism – all those icky things that we hated about our government were going to be history!  We fell for it and bought the bright new box of soap.  And then, because some of us still couldn’t believe that the new stuff wasn’t any better than the old stuff, we bought another box in 2012.

Montana democrats are trying to sell us a new box of soap again this year – a brash, young, progressive named Amanda Curtis.  But once you claw off the fancy wrapper, she’s nothing more than the same old big government, pro-abortion, anti-gun, tax and spend liberal with a smug, obnoxious attitude!

The party establishment knows they’re peddling a pathetic product, but they didn’t have an alternative – the old and reliable wasn’t exactly flying off the shelves anymore, and the sorta new, slightly improved version they got behind last year was an unmitigated disaster.  So they did what any desperate organization would do:  Panicked and screwed themselves worse.

She claims to be new and improved, but she does the same things the old version did.  Right out of the box she began attacking her opponent’s age, gender, and accomplishments because she can't sell her own message.  It’s an interesting marketing strategy – keep talking about the other guy’s box in hopes that the consumers won’t notice that your product sucks.

So her product is poor and her marketing approach is questionable, but you have to hand it to her for her sales scheme:  Amanda’s brandishing her leftist positions to a core group of passionate supporters in the hopes that they’ll recruit a cult of kids to get out there and sell the soap for her.  She calls it a grassroots approach, and she’s hired a totally inexperienced campaign manager whose background as a community organizer and tree-hugging, job-killing environmental obstructionist should have this campaign ready for prime time in a couple of months.  It’s lining up to be her personal political “Am-Way^©” campaign – predicated on the theory that with a sucker born every minute, there are a lot of suckers out there – if she can just get to enough of them in the next 70 days to either dazzle them with the fancy package or baffle them with the bullsh*t. 

An Am-Way^© campaign is particularly handy when the seller can’t use traditional media marketing – exactly the situation Amanda Curtis is in.  She hasn’t got the money or the time to create much of a paid media blitz and there’s precious little of that commodity available to her anyway - even if she does come up with the money.  But with her anarchist teacher buddies in the MEA and the aforementioned community organizer out there culling the herd, she might have access to a bunch of high school students who can hit the streets in the major population areas to peddle her communist ideology and socialist agenda.  Thing is – her cult of potential distributors is pretty much distracted with the start of a new school year and the attendant folderol that comes with that first month or so:  Reconnecting with friends not seen for weeks (or minutes, in the case of young women whose lives bounce manically from drama to drama with lightning speed), and gearing up for the non-stop extracurricular activities that make up modern American high school life.  If she had months to get their attention and focus their energy, mayhap they could be the busy little political pyramid builders she needs to peddle her unique brand of same-old, same-old. 

The question is, in less than 70 days, can she connect with enough attention-deficit teen-agers, convert them into mindless liberal cultists, and motivate them to abandon their personal priorities for her benefit?  It’s a tall order.  But it’s her only hope:  there aren’t that many grown-ups who haven’t been burned by the lofty promises and disappointing results from the left-wing Progressive faction of the Democrat Party over the last six years and are willing to sacrifice their personal credibility to endorse these snake oil sales pitches.

Will Montanans buy the shiny new package with the same old soap inside?  A few will, no doubt – you can fool some of the people some of the time, after all.  But as the election nears and the voters look more closely they’ll see that a pompous peddler pitching worn out, tried-and-failed ideas is not the person they want to represent them in the U.S. Senate.  

When it comes down to the final choice, smart people can tell the difference between the container and the contents – and they aren’t going to waste their time, money, or votes on a fancy box of worthless crap.


Guest Post - MT City Girl