Category: Red State

Radtke, Red State and Riehl
UPDATE: Radtke Campaign’s Attorney Demands Retraction and Apology
UPDATE: Radtke Denounces ‘Scurrilous Behavior’ by GOP ‘Establishment’

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UPDATE 4:50 p.m. ET: Dan Riehl clarifies the timeline and emphasizes: “It’s between the Radtke Campaign and RedState, no matter how some are trying to muddy the water to distract.”

UPDATE 1:10 p.m. ET: Dan Riehl links to a legal letter sent by Patrick McSweeney, attorney for Virginia Senate candidate Jamie Radtke:

On behalf of Jamie Radtke, I am sending this letter demanding your immediate and prominent retraction of your August 24, 2011, posting on RedState and your August 25, 2011 Morning Briefing in which you repeat statements of certain unnamed persons who attended the August 13th dinner at the RedState Gathering in Charleston, South Carolina at which Ms. Radtke spoke. One of the statements in your posting claimed that Ms. Radtke “gets drunk, and gets so embarrassing that I have to duck away….” Another statement that you repeated charged: “She was a drunk, rambling idiot that took 30 minutes to introduce a director who himself was confused.” Those statements are false. You plainly repeated the statements quoted above without regard to their accuracy.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE 1:15 p.m. ET: In case you didn’t notice, McSweeney’s letter is CC’d to Jeff Carneal and Tom Phillips, respectively the president and chairman of Red State’s parent company, Eagle Publishing.

UPDATE 1:20 p.m. ET: Will these statements by Erickson be acceptable to the Radtke campaign’s attorney?

UPDATE 2:10 p.m. ET: In an e-mail “campaign update” sent to Radtke’s supporters and conservative bloggers, her communications director Chuck Hansen writes that “the Establishment Republicans and their buddies in the Establishment Media going after Tea Party supporters who threaten their Good ‘Ol Boy power is an all-too-common phenomena.” More from Hansen’s e-mail:

George Allen’s cocktail party social set lived down to expectations this week, working through Erick Erickson to launch some very nasty attacks on Jamie. So much for Virginia gentlemen.
Of course, they had no problem accepting the Tea Party’s activism, energy and votes last year, which put them in power in the House . . .
Yesterday, on the front page of Redstate.com, Erick Erickson lashed out and wrote a blog smearing Jamie Radtke with completely false attacks by publishing libelous pejoratives in hopes of damaging her reputation.
Erickson wrote his column in response to a report on another blog that he had told Radtke, “My bosses are HUGE [George] Allen friends, not just fans. They are socially connected. So I’m having to tread carefully in this.”
Erickson, after confirming that he had made the statement, wrote a vicious blog that defamed Jamie’s character.
“Erick’s blog goes beyond the pale,” Radtke stated. “He crossed the line by publishing complete falsehoods. Now, it is his responsibility to admit he did wrong, set the record straight and apologize – and that is what I am asking Erick to do.
“This kind of scurrilous behavior and treatment has been repeatedly carried out on tea party leaders and conservative candidates who dare challenge the good ‘ole boy Washington Establishment. This attempt by the Washington Establishment to destroy the tea party and their candidates must stop. Enough is enough.
“What is most important is that we focus our attention on beating a President and his liberal Democrat friends who want to fundamentally change America. I encourage the tea party to stay determined and committed to fight back against the negative narrative on us and let’s defeat Obama and his liberal cohorts.”
Carter Wrenn, chief strategist for Radtke’s campaign, stated that a formal letter from legal counsel had been sent to Erickson demanding a retraction. “To put it as bluntly as possible,” Wrenn said, “Erick Erickson made an untrue and malicious attack on Jamie Radtke yesterday and repeated it again today. He should retract his statement, admit it is untrue and apologize for his mistake.”
Rocking the Boat in DC is hard, and doing so gets the entrenched interests very angry – that’s why it takes a special, determined leader to make it happen. Jamie is that kind of person, a new generation of courageous, conservative leader, who will stand up to Establishment Washington and their attacks and win!

You can see most of this at Radtke’s site. Meanwhile, Ben Smith and the Washington Post are popping the popcorn. Erick Erickson calls this a “distraction” — as any accusation of libel always is.

PREVIOUSLY (12:28 p.m. ET): The fallout continues from yesterday’s eruption of an online knife-fight between the campaign of Jamie Radtke, Virginia’s Tea Party candidate for Senate, and Red State’s Erick Erickson.

Erickson accused Dan Riehl of fomenting that fight, and Riehl isn’t denying it. The alleged motive involves another prominent conservative blogger, Michelle Malkin. Remember that Red State scored a publicity coup by hosting Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential announcement. Malkin wrote a column exposing flaws in Perry’s record and, when Red State’s Streiff wrote a post impugning Malkin’s “integrity and intellect,” Dan Riehl demanded that Erickson retract the slur.

(I can’t recall Malkin ever getting directly involved in a blog war. Even after Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs threatened Malkin in April 2009, she refused to respond. But you may have noticed how rapidly LGF’s decline and fall ensued.)

Erickson refused to stifle Streiff and says that Riehl responded with threats of destruction. I’ve known Dan long enough to know that he doesn’t make idle threats, so if all of this is the fulfillment of Dan’s vow of vengeance, it is not an entirely unexpected development. But there are two points worth noting:

  1. Dan didn’t start it. Streiff attacked Malkin, and Dan chivalrously defended Malkin’s reputation. If Erickson had disavowed Streiff’s attack, the blog war would have ended there.
  2. Erickson’s counter-attack on Jamie Radtke was probably a blunder. He practically called Radtke a drunk. She’s a Christian home-schooling mother of three, widely admired by Tea Party activists in Virginia. Erickson’s attack on her is likely to rally her supporters, and to hurt Red State more than it hurts Radtke.

But we have to ask if this might turn into something more serious than a blog war. As I said yesterday, one of the reactions I got from non-combatants was, “Uh-oh — he’s going after Carter Wrenn.”

That’s Radtke’s campaign manager, a veteran Republican operative with a street-fighter’s reputation. You don’t call Wrenn’s candidate a drunk and then just walk away.

David Frum sees the controversy as evidence of the influence of “hidden power brokers,” and Dave Weigel at Slate and John Hudson at the Atlantic have also taken notice of this dispute, but I’m not sure any of them understand how Erickson’s attack on Radtke has upped the ante in this game. And I’m reasonably sure we haven’t seen the last card played.

Virginia Feud: Radtke vs. Red State UPDATE: Palin/Perry ‘Proxy War’?

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My co-blogger Smitty is a Virginian who first blogged here about Jamie Radtke, the Tea Party candidate in next year’s Republican primary to replace retiring one-term Democrat Sen. Jim Webb. In July, I added my own two cents in support of Radtke, writing:

Her biggest obstacle is overcoming the GOP Establishment’s support for former Sen. George Allen. While many conservatives know and admire Allen personally, Radtke’s grassroots campaign offers an opportunity to carry forward into 2012 the Tea Party momentum that helped Republicans retake the House in 2010.

The blog is therefore clearly in the Radtke camp. However, we harbor no hostility toward Allen or his supporters — whose ranks we will happily join if the former senator should prevail in the primary. Our forthright support for Radtke is a luxury afforded by our independence, a luxury that some others might envy:

Ben Smith at Politico today reports that Erick Erickson of Red State backed off his early endorsement of Jamie Radtke — a Tea Party-backed candidate in the Republican primary for next year’s Senate race in Virginia — because of what Erickson called “the long term relationship” between former Sen. George Allen and Red State’s corporate owner, Eagle Publishing.

You can read the Politico story — based in part on e-mails obtained from Radtke’s campaign — and feel Erick’s pain. He was caught in a conflict between what he wanted to do (back Radtke against the GOP Establishment) and what his bosses wanted to do (support their long-time friend Senator Allen). Now, however, Erickson has doubled down against Radtke — and against Radtke’s campaign manager, Carter Wrenn, a veteran conservative who is legendarily known as a take-no-prisoners operative. There’s already a Memeorandum thread, so it’s time to pop some popcorn if you enjoy a bloody internecine knife-fight.

Erickson obviously isn’t happy that Radtke went public with this controversy, but as I say at The American Spectator, “there is nothing wrong with corporate publishers exercising editorial oversight.”

My bosses at the Spectator are friends with Erickson’s bosses at Eagle Publishing and, for all I know, share their enthusiasm for Allen’s GOP primary campaign. That would not pose a conflict of interest, though, because my bosses have never demanded that I take sides in the race or told me to back off my support for Radtke. They pay me to report the facts, and my opinions here are entirely my own.

JAMIE RADTKE FOR U.S. SENATE

UPDATE: Things are getting incredibly weird now. Erickson is blaming Dan Riehl for the Politico story. Among the several non-combatants who have called me about this escalating weirdness — comments running the gamut from “WTF?” to “Uh, oh — he’s going after Carter Wrenn” — one caller just suggested that this is actually a “proxy war” involving Sarah Palin’s supporters (who are hoping she will endorse Radtke) vs. Erickson’s faction who have swung their support behind Rick Perry.

UPDATE II: Dave Weigel dogpiles, but doesn’t seem to get the nuance and backstory, especially the seriousness of Erickson more or less calling Carter Wrenn’s candidate a drunk.

For evidence of the “proxy war” theory, see Palin’s famous fan Tammy Bruce on Twitter — here, here, here and here, for example.

UPDATE III: “This is about as ugly an event as you could imagine,” writes Tom White at Virginia Right.

GOP Presidential Primary Apocalypse

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Tim Pawlenty’s former campaign staff is reportedly hoping to join the campaign of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. This is amusing: Who wants to start their campaign with a team of losers? It’s also pathetic: Unemployed campaign staffers pinning their future hopes on a guy who has repeatedly said he is not running for president. And the ex-Pawlenty staffers are trying to make themselves seem more desireable by asserting that they’ve “resisted overtures” from Paul Ryan’s prospective campaign.

Longtime Red State contributor Josh Trevino says Michelle Malkin is “insane”  and “fringe” to criticize Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller wrote: “Some conservatives, of course, weren’t happy with Malkin’s criticism. When it comes to covering conservative primary candidates, some people think conservative writers should just turn a blind eye — or  solely focus on attacking Obama.”

The problem here is that Perry’s fans — and the Red State crew seems to be leading the charge — have portrayed their guy as All That and a Slice of Cheese and now seem to expect everyone else to cede the nomination to their anointed candidate. As I have explained, I was offended by the Perry campaign’s roll-out, a deliberate diss to the Ames Straw Poll. (Iowan sources told me that Perry’s people had approached the Iowa GOP about getting in on the straw poll and evidently didn’t like the terms offered.) My out-front support of Herman Cain might suffice to explain my resentment of the Perrybots, but really: Don’t supporters of other candidates — Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, et al. — also have a legitimate grievance at being told that Perry is beyond criticism?

They’ve been out out there getting chewed up every day for months, and suddenly they’re just supposed to acclaim the Anointed One?

Because Red State says so? Dan Riehl eats Red Staters for breakfast.

Meanwhile, Dave Weigel has a good piece exploring the possibility of an endless primary fight that results in a brokered convention at Tampa.

I had raised this same possibility Thursday, with the caveat that it’s probably wishful thinking: A brokered convention is every political journalist’s dream. It was what we’d all hoped the Hillary-Obama battle would lead to in 2008. Yet the crowded GOP field and the new RNC rules about delegate apportionment — prohibiting winner-take-all primaries before April 1 — do permit the glimmer of hope that we could witness a multi-ballot Armageddon at the Republican convention. (Theme song: “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”)

And while you wrap your mind around the idea of a Tampa apocalypse, consider this: The Sept. 3 Iowa “Restoring America” rally featuring Sarah Palin has switched its site to Indianola to handle a larger crowd:

There has been speculation that Palin, a former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, could use the event as an opportunity to announce whether she plans to run for president in 2012.
“I don’t know if she’s going to announce or not,” said Charlie Gruschow, co-founder of Tea Party of America. “But whether or not she announces, we’re going to have a huge event.”

Everybody who knows anything about presidential politics has already decided that Sarah Palin is not running in 2012.

But has Sarah Palin decided yet?


Malkin Not Keen on ‘Governor Gardasil’

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The Boss went after Rick Perry for imposing mandatory vaccination with Gardasil on 12-year-old girls. Gardasil protects against human pappiloma virus (HPV, genital warts) and, at the time of the 2007 decision, social conservatives were outraged by the idea of requiring that girls so young be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease. Libertarians were outraged at the mandatory aspect of the requirement. Perhaps the worst part was that it appeared Perry was acting corruptly, as a favor to lobbyists for the vaccine manufacturer, Merck.

In response to this criticism, Streiff at Red State wrote a post about “the bad faith and dishonest arguments being made in regards to this decision. Unfortunately, people I have previously had some respect for have checked their integrity and intellect at the door on this subject” — and linked Malkin, thus accusing her of a lack of “integrity and intellect”!

Dan Riehl demanded that Red State’s Erick Erickson apologize for that.

Amid all this friendly-fire action, The Right Perspective recalled my own gut-hunch reaction to the Perry campaign’s roll-out: “I felt a need to put on the record my instinctive sense that there’s something fundamentally wrong about the Perry campaign . . . . Some kind of catastrophe will result, one way or another.”

I took a lot of flak for saying that at the time, but if Perry is so self-evidently the GOP Dream Candidate for 2012, why are Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett and John Boehner urging Paul Ryan to get in the race? I don’t know.

What I do know is that a lot of conservatives seem to have doubts about Perry’s candidacy, and that these doubts aren’t getting much media notice amid all the hype about the alleged Dream Candidate.

Erickson Must Be Relatively Less Cynical Than Me

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by Smitty

Erick Erickson seems shocked, SHOCKED! that that GOP is ceding the tempo on the debt ceiling:

Now the Democrats want to increase the limit on the national credit card instead of paying down the bill. They want a free pass to more spending. Instead, the Republicans should accept the fact that no matter what they do they will never win over the press and should instead refuse to raise the debt ceiling without massive cuts and entitlement reforms.

The American people understand what it means to refuse to pay down credit cards and instead get new credit cards. They understand that is what government is doing. And they are tired of it.

If the Republican Party will not aggressively fight for real cuts and real reform in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, if at all, it very much will be time for a third party in this country.

As I was arguing yesterday, you’ve had a century of development to get to this cliff edge. We didn’t just show up. The Ruling Class as divided the people, with the Left taking the port end of the income distribution, and the Right taking the middle. The ‘sudden’ emergence of the Tea Parties, which seem ancient in Internet years, still isn’t older that the Perot-vian flash in the pan, back when Newt Gingrich had credibility.

Thus, the threat of a third major party is more useful than an actual third party, in my opinion. Shaking loose the Specter or Murkowski in centrist no-man’s land is more useful than having conservatives fragment. The only winner in that scenario is the Ruling Class.

The debt ceiling is an important battle, but pay more attention to the Rand Paul/Marco Rubio/Jim DeMint triumvirate for cues. We go to battle with the leaders we have. Sprinklerman and Eric “YouWhittle” Cantor are trying to get some right rudder on the ship of state. However, the President is using signing statements in overt defiance of Congress. I submit that:

  • The Tea Parties have to keep the pressure on the GOP, but
  • More than bending the GOP around the edges a bit will prove counterproductive.

We have a small target to hit, people, and the chances of a catastrophic cock-up are non-zero. Take it calm, take it stoic, and keep the pressure on.

Conservatives: Relax About Boehner

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by Smitty

I’m totally with Red State on this one.

No, they shouldn’t. I think John Boehner is more conservative than Eric Cantor, who’d most likely replace him, but Boehner’s leadership has been crap lately. This deal that got us $38.5 billion in cuts, turns out to not only have gotten us $14 billion in cuts, but also raised the baseline on spending. That’s a fancy way of saying it will wind up costing us money to get these cuts and put the Democrats in a better position to begin the 2012 budget fight.

Boehner just seems off his game. He is advised by Barry Jackson, an amiable guy from the Bush Administration whose first major policy fight as Boehner’s Chief of Staff following the untimely death of Paula Nowakowski was to make sure support for traditional marriage got stripped from the GOP’s Pledge to Nowhere or whatever they called it.

Listen, ye Tea Parties: you did not give Boehner a veto-override majority in the House. You did not provide a GOP Senate Majority Leader.
You go to political war with the majority you have, not the majority you might want or wish to have at a later time, to paraphrase Rumsfeld. It’s all well and good to have people setting expectations low, and mocking the details as they leak out of the stinky diaper.
However don’t wear yourself out on the 112th Congress. This election was never more than a restraining order.
So yes, let us vent, but keep the blood pressure moderate. This Congressional rear-guard action, while tactically important, is strategically of less value than the 2012 election. We’re not fixing the deficit, much less the national debt, in a single Congress. It’s borderline miraculous to focus the discussion on hahrd things like the deficit, when people want to fret more important things like birth certificates.
So let’s keep up a measured pressure on the GOP, but not wear ourselves out on ground that simply will not be fruitful.

A Post That Is Not About Net Neutrality

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At BlogCon Friday, we went to the Newseum in D.C. for a panel discussion that was supposed to be about politics. During the Q&A period, however, it got hijacked into a discussion of The World’s Most Boring Policy Issue. After ten minutes of this narcolepsy-inducing blather, I gestured frantically at Tabitha Hale and got the microphone for the next question, the beginning of which was Tweeted by Glen Asbury:

Seriously. That was ten minutes of our lives we will never get back.

Erick Erickson of Red State with National Review‘s Jim Geraghty, who loves Mike Castle in pretty much the same way an 11-year-old girl loves Justin Bieber.

Bill Whittle and Stephen Green now have perfect spinal alignment, after hanging out for a few minutes with Dr. Melissa Clouthier. She’s billing it to PJTV’s health insurance plan.

Tabitha Hale liked that caption so much, she said she’d hit the tip jar — when hell freezes over.