Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time
Now this is interesting. According to the hard-right online mag Insight (via HuffPo), a “senior GOP source” spills that the GOP gave Joe Lieberman “millions” for his primary campaign, to ensure his loyalty later. (Just so all you newly minted Connecticut for Lieberman party member know who’s paying for the balloons.)
It fits the narrative in a way, I suppose. But why would this story–and it feels like a “story”–get strategically dropped by a far-right cat’s paw now? If you poke around on the site, you get the feeling that not much happens there that isn’t approved (or at least approved of) by the neocon apparatus. They’re not trying to queer Joe’s bid–indeed, they’ve cut the actual GOP candidate loose and now seem to be putting their eggs in the, uh, CLC basket. I suppose they could be trying to signal–whom? the “base”? Disney?–that Joe is actually their guy. (And yet, while confirming that Lieberman “took the money,” the shadowy source says, Lieberman confirmed that he won’t “play ball.” What is this? An old episode of “Miami Vice”?)
I can’t help but wonder: could this be a sting operation to see what liberal bloggers fall for the “rotten Joe Lieberman” story, so they can track the inevitable rants, pull the allegation, and discredit them later? It would be classic Rove, and somehow the story doesn’t exactly reek with credibility. Anyway, it’s a developing play. Welcome to Campaign 2006, where dissent is fascism, free speech is slavery, and Democrats are Republicans (and vice versa):
GOP secretly channeled millions to Lieberman
The White House funneled millions of dollars through major Republican Party contributors to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s primary campaign in a failed effort to ensure the support of the former Democrat for the Bush administration.
A senior GOP source said the money was part of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove’s strategy to maintain a Republican majority in the Senate in November. The source said Mr. Rove, together with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, directed leading pro-Bush contributors to donate millions of dollars to Mr. Lieberman’s campaign for re-election in Connecticut in an attempt that he would be a “Republican-leaning” senator.
“Joe [Lieberman] took the money but said he would not play ball,” the source said. “That doesn’t mean that this was a wasted investment.”
Mr. Rove has been responsible for the White House’s effort to ensure a GOP majority in Congress for the last two years of Bush’s presidency. Internal party polls show the GOP could lose between 30 and 40 seats in the House as well as its majority in the Senate. A Democratic majority in the Senate would require the GOP to lose at least six seats.
The source said that under Mr. Rove’s direction, the GOP has abandoned its Senate candidate in Connecticut, Alan Schlesinger, who has dropped to about five percent in the polls. …
Wheels within wheels…!
