The Workday Liberal

I normally don't post on Sundays, but I thought I would make a special exception and write about the weirdness from my brother in Christ, Representative Doug Lamborn (R. Co).

Two of his constituents have written a letter to the editor regarding Rep. Doug Lamborn for The Woodmen Edition, which is a local newspaper in Colorado. It just so happens that the letter writers were involved in the campaign of a rival of Lamborns in the Republican primary for the seat currently held by Lamborn. The letter to the Woodmen Edition mentioned that Lamborn was the beneficiary of campaign donations from gambling interests.

It just so happens that campaign records prove that Lamborn did indeed receive $1000 from the International Game Technology PAC (which manufactures gambling equipment) and $500 from an executive of a local casino. Lamborn now claims to have returned both of those contributions, but FEC records which allow for disclosure of returned donations do not indicate that Lamborn actually did return those in particular.

Now you may wonder why it is that bhfrik... some wild eyed lefty in Eugene Oregon, might know or even care about some pissing match between Republican factions in an obscure district in Colorado. The reason this has come to my attention is that Lamborn decided the best course of action to take on this was to leave threatening, religiously oriented messages on the answering machine of the couple who wrote the letter to the editor regarding Lamborns taking of gambling money!

FIRST MESSAGE: "Hello, this is Doug Lamborn calling for either Jonathan or Anna. Something very serious has happened. There was a letter to the editor that you both put in your names to the editor of the Woodmen Edition and there is something that is blatantly false in that letter.

"I would like to get together with you and show this to you and appeal to you as a brother and sister in Christ. You didn't give me that opportunity but I am happy to overlook that and deal with you on that level because I think that is the right thing to do and show you where you made a blatant, wrong statement.

"Now there are consequences to this kind of thing, but I would like to work with you in a way that is best for everyone here concerned. So please call me at your earliest convenience. It is now 2:40 (p.m.) on Saturday afternoon.

SECOND MESSAGE: "Hello, this is Doug Lamborn again, I'm finishing up my message from a moment ago. I got cut off. It is critical that you get back to me as soon as possible on this because I'll be going back to Washington here in a few days and I have to make sure that this is resolved one way or another. And like I said I'd rather resolve this on a Scriptural level but if you are unwilling to do that I will be forced to take other steps, which I would rather not have to do. So please call me. This is essential. Call me by tonight, Saturday night and we can get together sometime Sunday afternoon."

As you can imagine Jonathan and Anna felt threatened by this message:

"We felt very threatened and intimidated, and quite frankly, scared," Anna Bartha said. "It was just not anything we would ever anticipate an elected official would pursue or a way that an elected official would conduct himself."

Quite right Anna, Republicans who are elected to office normally do not conduct themselves in such a manner. They typically leave it up to the hired guns they bring in to conduct their opposition research... ala the Republicans in New York who hired Roger Stone to help bring down Democratic Governor Spitzer. Stone anonymously left an obscene tirade on the answering machine of Spitzers elderly father. When Spitzers dad hired investigators to track down the call they traced it to the phone of Roger Stone. The recording was matched to other recordings by Stone, and the result was obvious. It was Stones voice on Spitzers machine.

Stone then denied culpability by claiming that Democratic operatives sent from his landlord (awkward!) could have broken into his home and, using modern technology to cobble the message together from publicly available Stone media appearances, used his phone to transmit the message. I actually was not aware that Stone was on tape using that sort of foul language. But the bigger question here is why couldn't Stone just admit the obvious when he was flat out busted instead of blatantly lying about it? I suppose the easy answer to that from my perspective is because he's a freaking Republican who got caught, and that is just the way of the modern Republican party. Honestly, I'm being nice about this, because if I wanted to get nasty about it I could go into the swinging lifestyle of Stone and his wife. (If that piqued your interest just google 'swinger roger stone')

So I suppose the message to society from all this is if you rub your local Republican operative the wrong way, you can expect a lewd and/or threatening response to be left on your answering machine. Luckily, here in The Peoples Republic of Eugene, we don't have many local Republican operatives, and this obscure little blog doesn't focus on local issues very much at all anyway... so I don't like my chances of being the recipient of such a message. How about this instead... if there are any Republican operatives out there who just can't stand someone like me goring your party and not being tossed into GITMO for it, feel free to leave an anonymous lewd or threatening comment on this post!