Thursday, May 31, 2007

Blaming the wrong messenger

Before we get started, we'd like to note that the Patton administration left way too much stuff sitting around for the Fletcher administration to discover. From a database on political job recommendations to "Crit's List" to phone message logs, the Patton crew has given us a nice wndow into how Democrats do things in Frankfort. But we digress...

The latest stir on Kentucky's political scene is the acquisition of a number of telephone messages from Crit Luallen's office when she was a Patton administration official by Brett Hall over at kypolitics.org. Since Luallen is running for re-election as auditor and Jack Conway, one of her former aides, is the Democrat nominee for attorney general, Hall (who was pushed out as Fletcher's press secretary for using the f-word in a conversation with reporters and for daring to speak the truth about the state GOP hierarchy's abandonment of their governor) began publishing phone messages between the two.

In his first offering, he published a message in which Conway referred to Anne Northup (whom Conway ran against for Congress a few years ago) as a "bitch."

Apparently still nursing hard feelings over their candidate losing last week's primary election to Gov. Fletcher, Northup's supporters immediately got angry -- at Hall, not Conway!

The Courier-Journal played this up as big news and soon-to-be-ex-Kentuckian (and we are oh so happy to say that) Mark Nickolas published the news on his abortion of a blog with great glee.

Our question is this: Aren't Northup's water carriers getting mad at the wrong person? Conway's the villain here, not Hall. Instead of being mad at Hall, you should be thanking him for exposing Conway's thoughts on his former Congressional opponent.

The view here is that Northup supporters are still angry that they lost and that their negative campaign got no traction.

Give it up, guys. You lost fair and square. Now it's time to come home to the Republican Party and work to unify us, not continue to tear us apart as you've done since Northup lost her seat to John Yarmuth and you started pushing her to run for governor.

And give Brett Hall a break. Get mad at the message and remember that Jack Conway's the one who said it. Hall's just telling the world what Conway said.

6 Comments:

At 8:58 PM, May 31, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said...

At least we know Teddie Jackson made it back from his holiday weekend noodling trip. What an absolute WATB. ot

 
At 1:37 PM, June 01, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jack Conway's words were certainly inappropriate. But they were his personal comments, made in the heat of the campaign to a close friend and advisor.

It was Brett Hall who made the decision to publish that comment to the world. It was Brett Hall who chose that comment out of 19,000 to highlight. And it was Brett Hall who did nothing more than widen the canyon that already exists in the GOP.

One wonders whether Brett Hall might have published the same comment about Glenna Fletcher if the same message had been left by someone about her. I don't think so.

Blame was placed squarely where it belongs--at the feet of Ernie Fletcher's hand-picked blogger.

 
At 8:36 PM, June 01, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said...

4 ex-Kentucky officials face ethics charges
By Tom Loftus
tloftus@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

FRANKFORT, Ky. — The Executive Branch Ethics Commission filed ethics charges this afternoon against four former members of the Fletcher administration in connection with a review of administration hiring practices.

Charged were former deputy transportation secretary James Adams; former commissioner of the governor’s office for local development Darrell Brock; former director of the governor’s office of personnel and efficiency Basil Turbyfill; and former deputy personnel cabinet secretary Robert Wilson.

All four were among those indicted by a Franklin County grand jury that investigated the Fletcher administration’s hiring practices under the merit system.

All four also were pardoned by Gov. Ernie Fletcher before they could be tried.

Today’s charges allege that the four, in different ways, violated the ethics code for state officials and took personnel actions that placed political considerations above qualifications in hiring for merit system jobs.

If found guilty of today’s charges, the four could be fined up to $5,000 per violation.

 
At 10:40 PM, June 01, 2007, Blogger K-Pac II said...

We have deleted a comment that used profanity and a vulgarity. Those are no-no's on this blog.

But to answer the question posed by the foul-mouthed poster, we consider Nickolas' blog to be "an abortion of a blog" because of his penchant for using lies, untruths, half-truths, taking statements out of context, smearing the reputations of good honorable decent people, and so on -- in other words, behaving like a typical Democrat. The collective IQ of Kentucky went up today and the collective IQ of Montana went down with the move of Nickolas and his shack-up from the Bluegrass State to Big Sky Country. Good riddance, we say!

 
At 10:27 PM, June 02, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, of course Hall would have published it if Conway had said the same thing about Glenna. That's the point! The guy running against Stan Lee for Attorney General is an @$$.

 
At 10:28 PM, June 03, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I guess things are even in the AG race then - From what I've heard, Stan Lee is a @SS too...

 

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