Moe Lane

FL-09 is, of course, the district that Alan Grayson is currently hoping to carpetbag – apparently the poor fellow has discovered that he has precisely zero reason to exist, outside of Congress.  It’s very sad – and the GOP is equally hopeful that they can stop him. I talked to one of the candidates last week: Mark Oxner, businessman.  We discussed the race, and a good bit about why Mark was running.

Mark’s site is here; the primary is August 14th.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Seriously.  FL-09 is the district that’s going to end up having Alan Grayson as the Democratic nominee, which makes it doubly important that the Republican primary not descend to any sort of negativity.  Grayson’s campaign, like any other cornered Rattus norvegicus, will undoubtedly seize upon anything that might distract from their central problem: to wit, that their candidate is Alan Grayson.  So I wish to be careful about this until the August primary.  Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, that sort of thing.

Fortunately, finding out that GOP House candidate Mark Oxner is a Philip K Dick fan counts as a positive – at least, to me.  I wish I had known that he read SF when I met with him recently; I would have brought it up.

Moe Lane

That’s the most likely conclusion that one can draw, amazingly enough.  Alan Grayson is typically precisely the sort of would-be domestic Taliban who might advocate the death of political… well, not ‘opponents.’  Rick Santorum is currently about three levels’ worth of influence above Grayson, and it’s Grayson’s fondest wish to shrink that disparity to two. So it’s very likely that the former Congressman from Florida is pretty much trying to ill-wish the Presidential candidate from Pennsylvania to death.

But there’s still the possibility that Grayson is merely abjectly stupid, so let’s pretend that he deserves the benefit of the doubt and analyze one of the latest whines of his in the most charitable of lights. (more…)

…to wit, getting into the news by hitting stuff with his car*:

Former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson crashed into a Lynx bus in downtown Orlando about noon Saturday.

[snip]

Investigators said Grayson was driving a Mercedes, when he ran a red light and hit the bus.

Glenn Reynolds notes that disregarding public safety to the point of injuring others while driving an expensive automobile to a fat-cat fundraiser would be generally considered the sort of thing that the Occupy movement would be against: my response to that is that consideration assumes that anyone that matters takes Occupational rhetoric seriously, including the Occupiers themselves.
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I apologize for having to use the term, but unfortunately it is a public record utterance by a then-Congressman.

This particular hypocrisy on the part of the Democratic party is almost… pure in its brazenness, really. It goes like so: the Democrats have put together a program called ‘Majority Makers’ where Democrats with good fundraising ability who are expected to win their elections are being tapped to spread some of that raised money around to candidates who aren’t doing so well. This in itself is hardly unusual, and not actually pernicious. No sense wasting money, right? – and it’s also expected that the money being passed along would be going to a candidate that shared the original candidate’s values.

The problem is that one of the keystones of the ‘Majority Makers’ program is Alan Grayson, running in FL-09; and his value system includes crude sexual-themed attacks against women who dare to have a different opinion than him on economics.

“…this lobbyist, this K Street Whore, is trying to teach me about economics.” (more…)

The fellow is planning to run for Congress again.  Alan Grayson is, of course, the frothing lunatic who was elected to FL-08 in 2008… and then promptly lost his first re-election in 2010, mostly because he was, well, a frothing lunatic who called his opponent (one Daniel Webster*) a member of the Taliban and made up stuff about Webster at a level not usually seen outside of a special Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episode about corrupt politicians… assuming such an episode was ever made.  And I kind of hope that one was; Grayson was and is certainly oily enough to be a live-action cartoon villain.

Mind you, Grayson may not be actually in FL-08 when this is over – or Rep. Webster may not be, for that matter.  The Florida legislature is in the process of redistricting the state to reflect their picking up two seats in Congress, and they’re not really keen about outsiders interfering in the process.  This is partially due to state legislators’ fairly standard reluctance to not let what will already be a fraught situation be made worse by rampaging incumbents; but it’s also partially due to the so-called “Fair Districts” constitutional amendments that passed last year.  Those amendments were designed to reform the redistricting process, and in the long run they may even actually do that.  But in the short run they promise to touch off what could be an epic battle in the courts over whether said amendments should take precedence over the racial gerrymandering guidelines set up by the Voting Rights Act.

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It’s a pleasure to hear it, in fact.

“I think he’s trying to stay in the political scene,” said Jim Kitchens, a Florida-based pollster who worked for [former Congressman Alan] Grayson and who remains in his inner circle. “He enjoyed being in Congress, he really did.”

I mean, it would just purely suck if my helping to throw this idiot out on his ear caused him to simply shrug philosophically and go on with his life.  Bitterly nursing a grudge is just what the doctor ordered.

Moe Lane

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Only… don’t run for the House, OK?  Your talents would be wasted in the House.  Senate!  You want to run for Florida Senate!  Sure, there’s a sitting Democrat there right now, but your allies among the netroots would line up to throw money at your candidacy against Bill Nelson*.  It would be a glorious sight.  GLORIOUS!

I won’t beg – I suspect that you enjoy that sort of thing far too much – but I will say this.  This is your destiny.

Your destiny.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

*Admittedly, about a quarter of them would be throwing money at you because they thought that they were throwing money at a primary challenge to Ben Nelson of Nebraska, another quarter of them would contribute thinking that they were funding a primary challenge to Ben Nelson in Florida, and a third quarter of them would donate because they thought that you were running in the Nebraska primary against Bill Nelson – but, hey!  The money doesn’t decrease in value just because it used to be held by idiots, am I right?

Why, it’s our old friend Mister Alan Grayson!  Hi, Mister Grayson!  Can you tell us about your footwear?

A Bronx native with a fondness for steel-toed cowboy boots (the better to kick Republicans with, he jokes)

Oh, Mister Grayson.  Have you not been taking your pills again?

…because that doesn’t look like you were quite… up… for kicking anybody last November.

Mister Grayson.

Moe Lane

PS: Now that it’s all over…

…you really shouldn’t have shoved that guy.  Be seeing you! – Oh, wait: no, I won’t.

*Classical reference.

In fact, the rest of the article is kind of superfluous:

Two blue plastic dumpsters, filling up with trash, ornament the reception area of Alan Grayson’s Capitol Hill office.

I mean, really: do you care about anything in said article that was written after that?

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Recently, I compared Alan Grayson to an ex-KGB agent who was now engaged in a second career as a Mafia pimp.  I don’t know what I was thinking: the KGB tried not to hire babbling fools, and neither does the Mafia.

Incompetent babbling fools, at that.

The short version: Grayson just got caught by the papers indulging in some sloppy video editing to make it look liked Daniel Webster said the exact opposite of what he did say*.  You can see the original video here (complete with Grayson’s habitual aroma of eau de fearstink): below are Webster’s actual remarks.

As my colleague Erick Erickson just noted, Grayson’s the kind of politician who would attack his opponent’s daughter for being a thespian.  And remember: Grayson is one of the netroots’ paragons.  They’d clone this doofus, if they could.

Moe Lane

*Extra points: he’s got a female staffer to make his excuses for him.  I wonder if she had to be the one to have to explain away the ‘whore’ comment?  Did she get drunk that night, and cry a little?

No, I’m actually sympathetic.  It’s not easy to find a job, these days.  Sometimes you have to do what needs to be done, and worry about the hit to your self-respect later.

Because he’s a poor excuse for a man and I won’t insult women by suggesting that he was one, of course.

The NRCC wasted no time at all in reminding the world of what Alan Grayson likes to, frankly, spew on a regular basis:

It’s actually an impressive video in its brevity: the temptation to make it a twenty-minute highlight of every vicious, sexist*, and bigoted thing that Grayson’s ever said must have been difficult. Which reminds me, Grayson: that Senior Policy Advisor of yours, Matt Stoller? The one who hates Jews the ADL and the military? Does that ever lead to awkward moments at staff meetings?

Daniel Webster for FL-08. Because sometimes the cliche applies: Enough. Is. Enough.

Moe Lane

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