Desperate Times. . .

As the old saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures, and it looks like Todd Tiahrt has finally reached his breaking point. Television ads from the Tiahrt campaign are suggesting that the candidate is quickly losing ground to his opponent while his website has busted out all of the stops with their “Moran Mythbusters” series that looks like something that would fit better on a cable television show than it does as a part of a political campaign. Let’s take a look at these developments:

In a recent television ad, the Tiahrt campaign claimed that Mr. Moran isn’t actually the fiscal conservative that he has been claiming, and they cite six votes to prove it. Of those six votes, five of them actually predated Mr. Moran’s time in Congress, and are actually from the early 1990s when he was a state legislator. This ploy by the Tiahrt campaign shows that they are desperately turning to whatever means they can to try to perform some sort of high stakes magic trick.

Their incredibly tenuous claims that these votes represent a troubling pattern of behavior, and that they show how Moran is willing to betray Republicans, are completely ridiculous and unfounded. Votes from the state legislature are about very different issues than votes in Congress, just as votes from 20 years ago were made under completely different circumstances than those that would be cast in the next two or three years. For the Tiahrt campaign to claim a link between these votes and Moran’s future congressional actions is far more than a reach.

This pattern of reaching deep into Moran’s record to make far-reaching claims is continued on the “Moran Mythbusters” pages of the Tiahrt website. Much of their supposed “evidence” on these pages goes back several decades, and even the descriptions of recent evidence is laced with confusing double-speak and even double negatives that make it nearly impossible to understand the truth behind what they are selling.

I’m not even going to get into all the double-speak and irony within their earmark pages, as I have well-documented Tiahrt’s addiction to earmarks. What I really want to know about this Mythbuster series is if the Tiahrt campaign got permission from the Discovery Channel program to ostensibly use their trademarked symbol and graphic as a part of their political campaign. While I don’t really know much about the Mythbusters show, I feel like the Discovery Channel would certainly want to stay out of the political fray of this mess.

I am wondering if Mr. Tiahrt’s campaign is actually illegally utilizing the Mythbusters symbol on their website. He better hope somebody out there can find some answers to these questions before Tiahrt digs himself too deep of a whole with this Mythbuster charade.

Mythically yours,

Publius