“Whatever Happened to Campaigning Honestly?”
Excerpt from ULM Political Science Professor Dr. Joshua Stockley’s op-ed on Vitter’s problem with honesty:
During last week’s historic health care debate, Sen. David Vitter, R-La., made a series of Twitter posts saying his opponent, U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., supported Nancy Pelosi’s health care reform bill. This is an interesting claim given that Charlie Melancon voted for the Stupak Amendment, which prohibits any federal funds in the health care reform bill from being spent on abortions, and against the health care bill. If you missed that: Melancon voted against federal funding for abortions and against the health care reform bill.
Vitter also declared this past week on his Web page that the climate bill being considered in Congress includes a “climate emergency” provision that “requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.” Ironically, it wasn’t the so-called liberal media that caught Vitter in this stretch of logic, but Ed Morrissey, conservative blogger and editor of the popular conservative website Hotair.com.
Ed Morrissey argued that the climate bill, while dangerous from a conservative point of view, doesn’t do what Vitter claims because nowhere in any climate bill does the term “climate emergency” appear. Morrissey wrote, “We need to focus on the real problems of the bill, chief among them that it will kill jobs to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, rather than generate false hysteria to answer false hysteria.”
Whatever happened to campaigning honestly?
