All other issues with the Mollohan/Wakim race aside, I found this part of the story intruiging. Here's the first three paragraphs:
Republicans are excited about several House races in which they say they have a chance to knock off an incumbent Democrat. One is in West Virginia, where Democratic representative Alan B. Mollohan faces Chris Wakim, a GOP state legislator who has promoted himself as a Persian Gulf War veteran with a master's degree in public policy from Harvard University.Truthiness all around:
As it turns out, Wakim's background doesn't exactly live up to his official biography. In a telephone news conference Tuesday, Wakim responded to his opponent's allegations of résumé-padding by admitting that he never served in the Persian Gulf during the war against Iraq in the 1990s. He also conceded that he received his master's degree at night and weekends from Harvard's extension studies program, and got it not in public policy but in liberal arts with a concentration in government.
In fact, Wakim said he was studying for his night-school degree while he served as an Army captain in Massachusetts during the Persian Gulf War.
Wakim maintained that these variations from his Web site's official biography were distinctions that made no difference in substance.Whah? A Persian Gulf veteran who didn't serve in the Gulf? And a master's degree in public policy that's actually a liberal arts degree? Those are "distictions with no difference"? The lovely part, of course, is that he was actually studying for the liberal arts degree while the war was actually going on.
These, my friends, are called lies. Here's Wakin's explanation:
During the news conference earlier in the day, Wakim had said that fellow students at Harvard informally referred to their degree as "public policy," so he felt free to do so now. He also said that he is within his rights to call himself a Gulf War veteran because he was on active duty during the conflict.Let me see - "Wakim was a Gulf War veteran" or "Wakim was in night school while on active duty in Massachusuetts during the Gulf War." One of those statements more closely reflects reality than the other one. Guess which one the Republican first chose to describe himself?
Republican Truthiness - you gotta love it.
Technorati Tags: Chris Wakim
" a piece on the Santorum purchase of the Green party candidate is right beneath it."
ReplyDeleteDemocratic Party demagoguery like this is part of why so many of us REAL progressives, liberals and leftists have abandoned the right wing JIM CROW Democratic Party.
New at LeftIndependent blog
Drug Busts=Jim Crow by Ira Glasser
"The fact is, just as Jim Crow laws were a successor system to slavery, so drug prohibition has been a successor to Jim Crow laws in targeting blacks, removing them from civil society and then denying them the right to vote while using their bodies to enhance white political power. Drug prohibition is now the last significant instance of legalized racial discrimination in America.
That many liberals have been at best timid in opposing the drug war and at worst accomplices to its continued escalation is, in light of the racial politics of drug prohibition, a special outrage. It is also politically self-destructive, serving to keep in power white conservatives opposed to everything liberals stand for. Liberals especially, therefore, need to consider attacking the premises upon which this edifice of racial subjugation is based. If they do not, who will?"
Republished at LeftIndependent blog, in its entirety, from The Nation magazine.
This column is too important to drug policy reform in America so I purchased it from The Nation to republish so that it will have a permanent freely accessible link.
LeftIndependent blog
Jim Crow Democrats prefer to campaign to right wing family values rather than left wing constitutional values like civil liberties, human rights and social justice. Democrats don't want progressive/liberal/left votes anymore so screw them.