Thursday, February 10, 2005

Noise Machine Hits Baltimore!

Finally! It's the mark of success for a politican when he finally gets a good attempt at a sex scandal tossed his way. Although our very own DisappearingInk mentioned it, Oliver Willis has more details on the O'Malley/Ehrlich dustup. What's great about having such a bitterly partisan state legislature that is currently quite at-odds with the governor is that we may end up with a reverse scandal. Wouldn't that be fun?

Of course, what we saw on the front page of the Sun was this headline. Anyone looking for "liberal bias" - like that crybaby of a governor we have, who won't even talk to the Sun because they're mean to him(uhm, in case anyone was wondering, the press is supposed to be mean to whomever is in office, and O'Malley's taken just as many knocks) - ought to do a double take, and is hereby granted an "ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME?" just for thinking it. In actuality, this is a perfect example of the standard issue noise attack. The rumour was started on Free Republic(the origin of the term Freeper, for anyone who wasn't sure), and has now moved to the front page of our only newspaper of record. And in case anyone missed it - and you could be forgiven for doing so since neither story we've linked mentions it - the guy who circulated the rumour is a long time aide to Ehrlich, not some random rogue state employee.

Please note, I'm not the world's biggest fan of O'Malley(we here at RUFNKM are not in the business of endorsements, but I think there's been at least two posts where we've said we prefer Doug Duncan for Governor). We just want to point out that when someone complains about "liberal bias" and denies that there's a "vast right-wing conspiracy", it's perfectly ok to ask "ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME?". And also a special Note to Freepers: speaking as a Baltimore resident, if you don't like O'Malley there's plenty of policy issues on which you could go after him that wouldn't require dragging his family through the mud. But now that we get to see the noise machine in action up close and personal, you've raised my sympathy for O'Malley, and that was a mistake.

Update:Incoherent Blather has a much more resolutely partisan take on it than we do.

Update: Due to a request from a reader, we changed a word in the above update to clarify.