October 13, 2004

Disgusting Poster Update

The disgusting flier distributed at the campaign office of a West Tennessee Democratic state legislator - the flier disparagingly comparing Bush and Bush voters to Special Olympians - has been mentioned by the Drudge Report, linking directly to a report posted at TeamGOP.org, knocking that site off the 'Net under a Drudgian onslaught of traffic. Sorry guys... (Update: TeamGOP.org is back up in limited form with the relevant press release.)

OpinionJournal.com also has covered the story.

I must admit I wish Drudge had linked to my blog am greatly pleased Drudge did not link to HobbsOnline!. I'm also pleased that I beat Drudge with the story by a day.

Following along behind both of us is the Tennessee Associated Press. Tom Sharp, a reporter with the Tennessee AP, is doing a story on the disgusting flier. He emailed me this afternoon and asked me to call him after someone sent him the link to my "open letter" posted here at HobbsOnline. According to Sharp, Fitzhugh is upset by the flier and has determined that a stack of them were left on a table at his campaign office by someone not connected with the campaign, and promptly thrown away by the volunteers working in the office that day. But soon after they were thrown away, someone came into the campaign office and got one to take to the local newspaper.

The tone of Sharp's questions to me was strange. A tad prosecutorial. I may be imagining things, but his tone and questions seemed to imply that he thought maybe a Republican left the flier as a way to embarrass Fitzhugh. He didn't say that, exactly, just kept saying how interesting it would be to find out who made the fliers.

(UPDATE: Wednesday afternoon I spoke to a staffer at TeamGOP.org and the campaign of Fitzhugh's Republican opponent, Dave Dahl, who tells me that several people were able to get a copy of the flier at the campaign office over a period of two weeks. You can contribute to the Dahl campaign here and help stop Democratic sleaze.)

It's worth noting, as a commenter did to a previous post on this story, that a decade ago another Tennessee Democrat resorted to a political slur denigrating people with Down's Syndrome.

On October 28, 1994, while in Virginia, then-Vice President Al Gore attacked Oliver North's Senate bid supporters as "the extreme right wing, the extra chromosome right wing." Advocates for those with Down's Syndrome, caused by an extra chromosome, were outraged.

Look for Sharp's AP story on the state wire soon, filling in the details of a story first broken here in the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Now I know why AP reporter Tom Sharp seemed to be implying that Republicans were behind the disgusting flier distributed at a Democratic campaign headquarters in West Tennessee: That's the official spin from the Tennessee Democratic Party, which makes the reckless charge without evidence.

Also, see my next post for a statement from the national office of Special Olympics condemning the flier and the bigotry that infuses it.

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