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Stop Lying, Jane Norton

by | 8:44 am, July 26, 2010 | 3 Comments

Because (as Benjamin Franklin noted) "half a truth is often a great lie," Jane Norton is often a great liar. She has repeatedly smeared Ken Buck's character with half-truths. (Norton and Buck are the Republican candidates vying for U.S. Senate in Colorado.) Consider:

* In a June 24 release, Norton's campaign claims, "[T]hen-United States Attorney John Suthers, the current Attorney General who was recently hailed by conservatives for suing to stop Obamacare, reprimanded Buck earlier in the decade and even required Buck to take ethics courses for ethical and professional breeches during his stint at the United States Attorney’s office." But Norton's claim is a half-truth. The full truth, as Dave Kopel explains, is that Buck was challenging an unjust prosecution by anti-gun zealot Tom Strickland, who initiated the reprimand before Suthers took over the office. Buck erred in a detail of how he challenged the prosecution, but he was quite right to challenge it.

* Currently Jane Norton's web page claims that, because Ken Buck said people should vote for him because he does "not wear high heels," therefore "Ken Buck may think a woman's place is in the house." But Norton's claim about Buck's comment is a half-truth. The full truth is that Buck made that statement as part of a dumb joke at the Independence Institute's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms party in response to Norton's gender-based attacks.

* Yesterday, Jane Norton's campaign sent out the following release:

Today, Ken Buck was caught on tape again. After spending the week explaining his high heels comments, today Ken Buck is explaining why he said he was "sick of Tea Partiers." Read the full story here.

Said Norton campaign spokesperson Cinamon Watson, “Ken Buck is two steps short of a fraud. He's a self-proclaimed tea partier who trashes tea partiers when he thinks no one is looking. He's an alleged fiscal conservative who increased his budget by 40 percent. He's a Tom Tancredo disciple who trashes Tancredo when he thinks the mic is off. Ken says he can appeal to swing voters and beat Michael Bennet, and then trashes the roughly 50 percent of voters who wear high heels. Bottom line: the voters of Colorado can't trust Ken Buck."


But Jane Norton and Cinamon Watson are simply lying about what Buck said about the Tea Parties.

In the Denver Post story the Norton campaign cites, the phrase "sick of Tea Partiers" does not appear. Here's what Buck did say on June 11 while somebody recorded him without his knowledge: "Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera?"

The simple truth is that the so-called "birthers" -- and I've also seen a few at Tea Parties -- ARE dumbasses, and Buck is quite right to point that out. (The obvious follow-up question is whether Norton defends the "birthers.") It should be noted that "birthers" are not representative of Tea Partiers. All big rallies, especially left-wing ones, attract some goofballs, nuts, and, yes, dumbasses.

It is particularly ironic that Norton's campaign accuses Buck of being "two steps short of fraud" in the very paragraph in which Norton's campaign lies about Buck.

I for one am sick of your lying, Norton. Knock it off. If you're going to continually lie in your primary campaign, how can voters trust you to honestly represent them as a U.S. Senator?

As a matter of political strategy, your lies are stupid. All you're doing is needlessly annoying Buck's supporters (as well as unaffiliated voters like me), making it harder for you to win the general election should you win the nomination. While it is true that Buck should learn when to keep his mouth shut, it is equally true that you should criticize him for what he's actually done and said, rather than for the half truths and great lies you're spinning about him.
Category: Colorado Politics, PPC
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Comments

  1.   Val
      July 26th, 2010 @ 10:19 am

    Channel 4 did a “Reality Check” on Jane Norton and concluded, basically, that she lies. See the first two video clips of Shaun Boyd:
    http://pod08.prospero.com/n/blogs/blog.aspx?webtag=KCNC_realitychk

    Thank you for pointing these lies out. Apparently, Norton thinks that if she tells a lie often enough, it will become true. I hope the voters have more intelligence than that.

  2.   Laura Victoria
      July 26th, 2010 @ 11:05 am

    I was the first blogger to get into Ken Buck’s budgets. This was part of a compare and contrast I was doing in the course of my writing on the SD 16 race, and the race’s ultimate loser, Summit and Eagle DA Mark Hurlbert.

    First off, though I was stonewalled by Hurlbert, I got all the budget information I asked for the following day from Ken’s office. By contrast, with Hurlbert,I was forced to obtain the information I needed from the counties, in a tedious and drawn out procedure. http://wp.me/pzqev-dk

    I found that Hulbert increased his budgets for all three years of the recession despite case filings going down about 20-25 percent as fewer tourists came to the ski resorts and workers moved away from the high priced towns as jobs disappeared. Plus, a lot more people did their drinking at home.

    Buck, by contrast, did increase budgets, but Weld County’s population grew, and had in fact had the highest rate of growth in Colorado. Yet Ken managed to marshall those resources effectively to reduce crime. Don Johnson did an excellent analysis of this. http://www.businessword.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/3464/
    In addition, the State Judicial branch added two new judges and two new courtrooms and he thus needed two new DAs to staff them. One might not agree that the state Judicial Branch needed to expand in this way (I don’t) but that’s hardly Ken’s fault.

    Jane’s distortion of this reality is like someone who just looks at revenue and not at the bottom line of profit.

    I’m a huge civil libertarian, and I don’t have a high opinion of most of the AGs and DAs who go on to higher office (think Elliot Spitzer, Arlen Specter, Bill Ritter), and I strongly opposed RINO Mark Hurlbert. So for me to support Ken Buck so enthusiastically is saying something.

  3.   Laura Victoria
      July 26th, 2010 @ 11:25 am

    I was the first blogger to get into Ken Buck’s budgets. This was part of a compare and contrast I was doing in the course of my writing on the SD 16 race, and the race’s ultimate loser, Summit and Eagle DA Mark Hurlbert.

    First off, though I was stonewalled by Hurlbert, I got all the budget information I asked for the following day from Ken’s office. By contrast, with Hurlbert,I was forced to obtain the information I needed from the counties, in a tedious and drawn out procedure. http://wp.me/pzqev-dk

    I found that Hulbert increased his budgets for all three years of the recession despite case filings going down about 20-25 percent as fewer tourists came to the ski resorts and workers moved away from the high priced towns as jobs disappeared. Plus, a lot more people did their drinking at home.

    Buck, by contrast, did increase his budgets, but Weld County’s population grew, and in fact had the highest rate of growth in Colorado. Yet Ken managed to marshall those resources effectively to reduce crime. Don Johnson did an excellent analysis of this. http://www.businessword.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/3464/

    In addition, the State Judicial branch added two new judges and two new courtrooms and he thus needed two new DAs to staff them. One might not agree that the state Judicial Branch needed to expand in this way (I don’t) but that’s hardly Ken’s fault.

    Jane’s distortion of this reality is like someone who just looks at revenue and not at the bottom line of profit.

    I’m a huge civil libertarian, and I don’t have a high opinion of most of the AGs and DAs who go on to higher office (think Elliot Spitzer, Arlen Specter, Bill Ritter), and I strongly opposed RINO Mark Hurlbert. So for me to support Ken Buck so enthusiastically is saying something.

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