Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Yes, it’s that time of day again. I’m sure you’ve got something you’re just burning to share, so here’s your chance.
We haven’t talked much about Ken Buck, the teabagging Senate candidate from Colorado. He’s a terrible person. A new story came out about how Buck refused to prosecute a rape when he was a District Attorney.
The alleged rape victim is back and determined to be heard. She told her story to the Colorado Independent and provided the tape of their meeting (click here for a pdf of the transcript), in which Buck appears to all but blame her for the rape and tells her that her case would never fly with a Weld County jury.
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This victim, though, has worked as a rape victims’ advocate, and she refused to let the matter drop. When her meeting with Buck got her nowhere, she organized a protest rally at the DA’s office. She spoke with the media. Buck was forced to respond.
He said the facts in the case didn’t warrant prosecution. “A jury could very well conclude that this is a case of buyer’s remorse,” he told the Greeley Tribune in March 2006. He went on to publicly call the facts in the case “pitiful.”
If he had handled it with a little more sensitivity, the victim, who does not want her name used, says it is possible she may have accepted the decision and moved on. But Buck’s words — as much as his refusal to prosecute — still burn in her ears.
“That comment made me feel horrible,” she told the Colorado Independent last week. “The offender admitted he did it, but Ken Buck said I was to blame. Had he (Buck) not attacked me, I might have let it go. But he put the blame on me, and I was furious. I still am furious,” she said.
It wasn’t just his public remarks that infuriated the woman. In the private meeting, which she recorded, he told her, “It appears to me … that you invited him over to have sex with him.”
Gender gap? What gender gap? One clear sign of a misogynist – they focus on the actions of the victim rather than those of the perpetrator.
Some Republicans dip their toes in the water in criticizing fellow Republicans. The Republican they’re criticizing is washed-up former Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Longtime observers say the two sides of Gingrich’s persona are in tension on a good day and in outright conflict on a bad. The recent comments linking Obama to colonial Africa and Democrats to food stamps sounded not simply anachronistic — the obsessions of an earlier generation — but also freighted with racial innuendo.
“He knows how to appeal to and arouse the conservative coalition,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “But he also has a tendency to go one stop further than he should.”
As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) put it of the Gingrich approach: “The good news is it gets people to listen to you, but the bad news is your negatives go up.”
Wouldn’t you know, Newt is Reagan, at least according to Newt’s friends. Plus, they found another Republican to criticize him, his almost-certain rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney.
“Two of the most important commodities in a candidate running for president are focus and discipline — and he’s got neither,” said an adviser to Mitt Romney of Gingrich. “He could be a great help [to the party] if he’d so choose, if he’d only help with messaging and ideas and be less of a provocateur. But that’s not what he wants to do.”
Gingrich’s longtime spokesman, Rick Tyler, offered a robust defense of his boss’s rhetoric and said leaders who speak bold truths often cause more timid listeners to recoil.
“They are the same people who were upset when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the ‘Evil Empire,’” he said, adding that FDR, too, “said some pretty provocative things in World War II.”
How reasonable and bi-partisan-y of them. When they start criticizing Jim DeMint, Rush Limbaugh and the teabaggers in public maybe I’ll believe they believe in something other than their own careers.