by William Skink
I was thinking that maybe I would try to repress my gag reflex and vote for Rob Quist. That thought had been building, but it quickly disappeared when I saw the latest stupid desperate smear of Greg Gianforte, financial backer of ISIS.
Here is Don Pogreba regurgitating this dumb swill from Huffington Post:
A Republican congressional candidate owns a stake in a French-Swiss cement company accused of making payments to the Islamic State militant group in Syria, according to financial disclosures HuffPost reviewed.
Greg Gianforte, the millionaire GOP contender for Montana’s open seat in the House, reported owning $47,066 worth of shares in LafargeHolcim as recently as December. The shares are in an individual retirement account at TWP, a brokerage firm and private wealth manager, on which he and his wife, Susan Gianforte, are listed as trustees.
Narrow-minded partisans taking desperate swipes at larger forces they maintain a willful ignorance towards is hard to watch. Here is the awkward truth: ISIS is a product of US imperialism, nurtured and armed by our Arab allies, like Saudi Arabia, to keep Iran’s influence in check.
But that reality won’t help partisans elect their cowboy poet, so instead we get one of the most pathetic attempts to smear a candidate I’ve seen since, well, the last attempt to smear Gianforte by trying to insinuate he’s some Russian stooge because his investment portfolio has some loot invested in Russian businesses.
Not everyone is going along with this sad, desperate attempt from a sinking campaign in the waning days of Montana’s special election. Here is James Conner:
This is neither a BFD nor a LFD, neither a tempest in a teapot nor a squall in a saucer. It’s just an attempt to smear Gianforte, who has not displayed conspicuous enthusiasm for settling Syrian refugees in Montana, as a funder of terrorists who have beheaded Americans.
It’s dirty politics, opposition research run wild.
Almost everyone with a diversified investments portfolio owns a piece of something that stinks. That’s the price of fiscal prudence. Neither Gianforte nor anyone else orders his investments banker to buy stocks in slimy corporations that bribe foreign officials and finance lunatic insurgencies.
This is the second time Montana’s Democrats have tried to question Gianforte’s patriotism by flagging a dubious stock in his investments portfolio. A few weeks ago, the MDP tried to tie him to the Russians because he owned Russian stocks.
Give it a rest, Democrats. Gianforte’s problem with wealth is not the stocks that he owns. It’s that like Mitt Romney, he’s lost touch with the middle class.
And here is Dan Brooks weighing in:
Montana’s special election is one week away, and the Rob Quist campaign is starting to look like a series of unforced errors. Let us begin with his nomination. Quist was handpicked by the Democratic Party, not by the usual primary system. Somehow, no one in that august political body thought to run a credit check. Pretty much the first story that came out was about the liens filed against their candidate for unpaid property taxes in 2011 and the bill for which he stiffed a contractor in 2001. I can see such problems haunting a popular favorite, but the Democrats chose Quist for his electability. Surely there was some other Democrat in the state who lacked not just political experience but also a debt trail.
Fortunately, the Quist campaign is staffed by experienced operatives from the state party. These old hands know the voters of Montana well enough to find sure ways to distinguish Quist from his opponent—for example, by running the exact same campaign ads. That’s how you win as a Democrat: by acting like a Republican. This principle explains why Quist downplayed his support for single-payer health care and emphasized his support for guns. It also explains why Hillary Clinton is president now. It does not explain why campaign manager Les Braswell accidentally tweeted as The Montana Cowgirl from the Quist campaign account, but we can’t explain everything. He probably got hacked.
Anyway, the Democratic Party is incompetent, even in the last best place. Facing an opponent who just lost a statewide election for governor in which he underperformed the top of his ticket by 20 points, they appear to be headed for defeat. Now is the time to reflect on deep questions. My deepest: In the present economic climate, how is being rich not the biggest obstacle a candidate can face?
This country desperately needs a real opposition party fighting against the rigged economy that never recovered for the vast majority of Americans. Instead, we get worthless Democrats who can’t even muster enough vetting to do a credit check on the cowboy hat they selected to run against a rich guy who just lost his gubernatorial race last year.
Pathetic.
While partisans like Pogreba use ISIS to smear their enemy, Trump is about to arrive in Saudi Arabia, the country that produced the majority of terrorists that supposedly attacked America on 9/11. Then Trump will visit Israel, a country that no one will ever investigate for their meddling in US elections. Then Trump will visit the Vatican.
I can only imagine what will be discussed behind closed doors. Maybe Trump is making sure these religious power centers are ready to kick off Armageddon. What will probably be announced in Saudi Arabia is a massive arms deal that will make American weapons manufactures billions of dollars.
There might be some outrage over this from the fake opposition we call Democrats, but conveniently ignored will be how good Obama was for weapons sales (Mother Jones):
The Obama years have been a boom time for America’s weapons makers. Since 2009, the United States has approved arms deals worth some $200 billion—more than under any other presidency. The deals include sending Apache helicopters to Qatar, “bunker buster” bombs and cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia, and Hellfire missiles all over the place. Predicting an increase in weapons sales fueled by the war against ISIS, an unnamed American weapons manufacturing executive told Reuters last year: “Everyone in the region is talking about building up supplies for 5 to 10 years. This is going to be a long fight. It’s a huge growth area for us.”
Fucking Democrats. You aren’t the resistance, you are major part of the problem and your party needs to be destroyed.