A few weeks ago I brought your attention to the devious and deceitful work of the poorly-named Democratic 527 group Accountability for Colorado. The group is heavily funded by teachers unions and the ultra-liberal billionaire tag team of Pat Stryker and Tim Gill, among others.
Accountability for Colorado’s dishonest attack fliers, radio ads and robo-calls against Republican state house candidates — using some of the same recycled outlandish arguments regardless of the candidate — have prompted inquiries to local District Attorney offices, specifically from Karen Cullen (HD 18) and Tom Janich (HD 31).
The latest candidate I’m aware of to have the local D.A. investigate the use of bizarre slanders from Accountability for Colorado is my own state house candidate Libby Szabo. Obviously, I won’t dignify the obnoxious attacks by repeating them — except to say specifically that some of them fail to comport with reality and at least one is so off-the-wall and out of left field that it really shows more about Lefty desperation than anything else.
Szabo herself is too smart to repeat the attacks, too, but that doesn’t mean she had to take them sitting down. Last week she sent out a recorded telephone message to thousands of district voters from her daughter Angel, which said: “I love my mom because she’s always stood up for what’s right and never let us get away with lying, especially lying about other people the way her opponents are lying about her.”
Honestly, as a supporter of the First Amendment, I’m not sure what to expect or hope for from the respective D.A. investigations. The best short-term medicine is to expose the Lefty machine into disrepute. And there’s an important lesson here for local candidates about the importance of fundraising and resources — which empowers them to get their message out quickly and effectively to combat the deception.
Another step would be to empower the teachers whose funds are being used to propagate the political filth to stand up and repudiate it, to make the union more accountable to members rather than to the demands of a Left-leaning political coalition. The same goes for consumers and the general public who could be made to see that some corporations have funded Accountability for Colorado and similar groups. Maybe a phone call to their PR or government relations office just to politely but firmly state that you’re sick of them underwriting the dishonest mudslinging.
But to deal with the problem in the longer term, the next step is for Colorado lawmakers to look at changing the state’s campaign finance scheme and its unintended consequences that take so much power away from accountable candidates and parties and gives them to shadowy, unaccountable groups that feel far less qualms about spouting inane lies.
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