The Trib, The Towel, And The Bus

5 days ago, Richard Mellon Scaife's editorial board threw in the towel on the Raja campaign.

Today, they throw him under the bus.  It's hardly surprising that the Über Conservatives there would trash Rich Fitzgerald, the Democratic nominee, but look at how they treat the Republican nominee:

Rich Fitzgerald, the Democrat nominee, is a caricature of the worst 19th-century pol -- swaggering, arrogant and ignorant. Think of his baseless smearing of a Rankin steel company as a "sweatshop." Think of his outrageous "pay-to-play" e-mail to the Marcellus shale industry. Think of his vow to preserve an unconstitutional property-tax system that, in typical "progressive" fashion, shafts the very people he claims he wants to help.

D. Raja, the Republican nominee, is a caricature of the "polibuff" -- a political buffoon. Lots of plans, not a whole lot of specifics. Lofty if not admirable goals, largely beef-bereft. Worse is that Mr. Raja, too, advocates a moratorium on the long delayed but now underway property reassessment -- despite the unconstitutionality of the existing property-tax system and repeated court orders to fix it. As a businessman, Raja should know better. An illegal property-tax system is no harbinger of economic growth.

To them, Raja's not just a political buffoon but a caricature of a one.  That's harsh.

5 days ago, they found fault with his campaign staff as well:

The mess that is the Raja candidacy should force all political candidates to question the campaign consultants running his show. Not only have they repeatedly eschewed the advice of more experienced GOP hands, they established policy proposals based on polling, not on what was right.

Today, Colin McNickle completes the task:

While Mr. Fitzgerald, the Democrats' nominee for Allegheny County chief executive, suggests a Fleecing of the Gullible is in progress, the more apropos critique is that, despite some success, Mr. Raja's consultants lack intellectual maturity.

The young-buck duo of Mark Harris and Mike DeVanney cut off the GOP ACE nominee at the thighs when, during the primary, they used polling to determine that Raja's position on the oft-delayed property reassessment -- ordered by the courts because the old system was unconstitutional -- should parrot the Dems' vow to delay it even further.

It ranks among the stupidest decisions in modern Allegheny County politics.

Then there's this:

[Harris and DeVanney] also dismiss some who helped bring them to the dance and others who can cancel their future dances. But they dismiss the growing legions of the latter at their even greater professional and financial peril. It will be a difficult, but necessary, lesson for them to learn. [emphasis added.]

Uh-oh. Looks like The Trib's found who to blame.  And they're gonna pay for it for a while.