California Conservative

The good folks at Newsmax have a partial transcript of a wild exchange between Paul Hackett and Chris Matthews. Here’s that exchange:

MATTHEWS: You said he wanted to drink alcohol and snort cocaine and party. Do you stand by that?
HACKETT: Those are the facts and I stand by them.
MATTHEWS: How do you know it’s a fact that the president snorted cocaine, as you say.
HACKETT: I think it’s been widely reported leading up to his first election. And there are many who have come forward and documented it and said they saw it happen. I take that at face value. I think that’s probably quite factual.
Given the fact that he worked so hard to avoid service during his generation, it seems consistent to me . . . .
MATTHEWS: You know for a fact that President Bush, the commander-in-chief, because you’re running for the U.S. Senate, was a cocaine user? You know that for a fact?
HACKETT: Well, I’ve read the reports as you have read the reports.
MATTHEWS: They’re not reports, they’re charges. I wouldn’t say that I’ve read it in the Associated Press or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. I may have heard the arguments made by people who I may not think have a firm grounding in journalism. But I’ve never heard a major or quality newspaper make such a charge.
HACKETT: I think that’s a fair criticism. I’m merely relaying what you’ve heard and what I’ve heard.
MATTHEWS: That doesn’t make it a fact, having heard it, does it?
HACKETT: Point well taken. I think, though, that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. [End excerpt]

This exchange gave the Looney Left another reason to hate Chris Matthews because Hackett was the Looney Left’s hero, a warrior who denounces war. Mark my words, the Left will use this article as proof that Matthews is a closet conservative. WHEN this prediction happens, I’ll provide a link for it.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones has posted an article where Mr. Hackett is allowed to unload against anybody he chooses. Here are the key sections:

With Brown, a party insider, on board, the Democratic establishment quickly began pulling away from the fiery Hackett. Schumer, after having wooed him in August, called again in October. “Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive,” Hackett told me at the time.

“But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do.” Hackett, a maverick who relishes the fight, decided to buck the Beltway insiders, and stay in the race.
Hackett’s scorching rhetoric earned him notoriety and cash on the campaign trail. He declared that people who opposed gay marriage were “un-American.” He said the Republican party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said “aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden.” Bloggers loved him, donors ponied up, while Democratic Party insiders grumbled that he wasn’t “senatorial.”

Thus began the Democratic Party’s campaign against the man that MoveOn.org/Daily Kos activists termed as a rising star. It gets dirtier:

A whisper campaign started: Hackett committed war crimes in Iraq, and there were photos. “The first rumor that I heard was probably a month and a half ago,” Dave Lane, chair of the Clermont County Democratic Party, told me the day after Hackett pulled out of the race. “I heard it more than once that someone was distributing photos of Paul in Iraq with Iraqi war casualties with captions or suggestions that Paul had committed some sort of atrocities. Who did it? I have no idea. It sounds like a Republican M.O. to me, but I have no proof of that. But if it was someone on my side of the fence, I have a real problem with that. I have a hard time believing that a Democrat would do that to another Democrat.”

Mr. Lane obviously wasn’t watching Al Gore destroy Bill Bradley’s presidential ambitions with one unsubstantiated criticism after another. He obviously doesn’t know how vicious Democrats are when they get down and dirty.

In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. “I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true” demanded the Senate minority leader. “No sir,” replied Hackett. To drive home his point, Hackett traveled to Washington to show Reid’s staff the photo in question. Hackett declined to send me the photo, but he insists that it shows another Marine, not Hackett, unloading a sealed body bag from a truck. “There was nothing disrespectful or unprofessional,” he insists. “That was a photo of a Marine doing his job. If you don’t like what they’re doing, don’t send Marines into war.”

Notice the increasing pressure brought to bear on Mr. Hackett? This isn’t surprising if you know anything about Democratic Party’s intimidation campaign strategies. I’m not saying that Republicans are totally clean. I’m just saying that Democrats’ dirty tricks arsenal is a more massive arsenal. BY FAR.

I’ll simply point to this advertisement against President Bush:

I’m Renee Mullins, James Byrd’s daughter. On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged 3 miles to his death, all because he was black. So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again. Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation. We won’t be dragged away from our future.

According to the story, this advertisement ran “in AR, GA, IL, KY, MI, MO, NJ, OH, PA and WI starting Oct. 25, 2000.” In other words, at the very last moment, Democrats played a dirty trick, not bothering to mention that the men who murdered Ms. Mullins’ father were convicted of first degree murder and are facing death by lethal injection.

Five years ago, this treatment was reserved for Republicans. Now they’re reverting back to the old paradigm that says “When you see a Democratic shooting squad, they’re aligned in a circle.”

Finally, don’t think that this won’t depress Democratic voter turnout in Ohio. It will.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 11:13 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, DNC, Elections, Liberals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.