Wednesday, October 10, 2012

To Josh Mandel: Have you no decency, sir?

In case you are the curious type, my official one-person poll of the guy who works at my computer has elevated Josh Mandel to the title of Greatest  Liar on the Ohio Ballot.  (GLOB)  He worked hard to get  there with $19 million in out-of-state donations from people who couldn't care less about average Ohioans.  He's merely the convenient front man for the one per centers who want to rid the Senate of Sherrod Brown.

For awhile, Josh was running neck and neck with other Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for the GLOB title,  but as PolitiFact/Ohio  reminded me  in the Plain Dealer today,  Mandel's political ads accusing Brown of missing more than 350 official votes is pulled out of la-la land, although the official record shows Brown has missed only 21 in his entire first-term Senate career. When Brown was in Congress, he missed 83 votes during a hospital  stay after an  auto accident.  He's missed 3 in the past 3 years.

Still , the fact checkers note that Mandel accuses the incumbent  of "living by different rules than us".  I can't argue with that.  Brown has an honest and open accounting of his work as a senator - while Josh  doesn't hesitate to lie about it. They do play by different rules.  Which leads me to ask, How desperate must this Whiz Kid  be to run such  TV garbage like this? Very desperate, I'd say, even with a $19 million war chest.


1 comment:

David Hess said...

One should blame the Ohio media for agreeing to run ads that are so patently and outrageously false. Yes, I know that the veracity of cunningly nuanced ads are hard to fact-check and should not be reviewed for truthfulness or misleading claims. But the magnitude of Mandel's mendacity on this one is so breathtaking that a simple prayer on his part for forgiveness, if he has the cojones to admit it, is not enough. There is a line that even a panic-stricken candidate should not cross. It is now up to those media organizations that repeated those charges to correct the record and apologize for their own misfeasance in not checking the record. And any more of Mandel's claims should undergo keen scrutiny before they go on the air or into print. Even free speech should, at the least, contain a germ of truth.