The Colonel Takes Dead Aim At His Foot

From the Herald Leader:

“Republican leaders who might have known about disgraced former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley's explicit sexual messages to underage male pages "are very liberal people" because they did not expose Foley's actions, Democratic congressional candidate Mike Weaver said in an interview with the Herald-Leader on Monday night.

"They have tolerated things that they should not have tolerated," Weaver said. "And it is far worse than what Bill Clinton wanted to do with "don't ask, don't tell" because this has to do with 16-year-old boys. So they covered that up, and that showed a very liberal tendency from some of the leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives."

Let’s talk practical politics for a moment.

Is Weaver trying to run off every voter that is not a lock-stepping right wing-nut in his District?

When it comes to policy Weaver is not much different from the right wing-nut Republicans. But liberals in this District, that’s anyone that is not a right wing-nut, will vote for Weaver just to create a Democratic majority in the House. They don’t support Weaver, but they will tolerate him to get the leadership changed.

About the only thing he did with this comment is piss off a portion of the voters that might vote for him.

What was he thinking with this comment?

A few more like this and he will hand the race back to Lewis. Would someone close to Weaver tell him to shut up and let the Republicans commit suicide in peace?

I just wish that Col. Weaver would quit shooting himself in the foot.

Inquiring Minds

I have always enjoyed watching politicians in an open forum try to answer a really stupid question. This is the question the moderator should have put in the trash can but didn’t.

Last night at Stonewall Elementary candidates for Lexington’s 9th District seat (Jay McChord and Wanda Mattingly) and all six of the candidates (Kay, Shafer, Gorton, Gray, Ellinger and Brown) for the three at-large seats had to answer this question.

The question went something like this, I paraphrase,

“How would you, as a council member, deal with the illegal immigrant problem in Lexington and the associated strains it is placing on social services and schools?”

Now I’m sure the answer that flashed in the minds of a few of the candidates probably went something like this:

“If you had been listening when we explained what the council does you wouldn’t have asked such a stupid question.”

Or maybe:

“When the Congress of the United States transfers the responsibility for those issues from Border Patrol and Citizenship and Immigration Services to the Lexington Urban County Council I’ll get back to you.”

However, most of the candidates made a valiant attempt to give a reasonable answer to this litmus test question.

Generally the answer was something like this:

We are going to follow the law and face the reality that Lexington has a Latino population of at least 30,000 individuals and we will treat them as human beings and deal with them with compassion and fairness.

But the real question here wasn’t what are you going to do on this issue as a member of the Council.

The question was really this:

What are you going to do to keep the Latino’s in their place?

The even in non-partisan races the Republican politics of hate and divisiveness are alive and well in south Lexington.