Backroom Battles (Mother Jones - Paul Hackett)

[VolcanoJen]

Well, this article is sure to stir up some flames.

Backroom Battles: Economic Sabotage, Whisper Campaigns, And Threats: How The Democrats Took Paul Hackett Out

A few paragraphs that really caught my eye:

In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. “I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true?” demanded the Senate minority leader. “No sir,” replied Hackett. To drive home his point, Hackett traveled to Washington to show Reid’s staff the photo in question. Hackett declined to send me the photo, but he insists that it shows another Marine—not Hackett—unloading a sealed body bag from a truck. “There was nothing disrespectful or unprofessional,” he insists. “That was a photo of a Marine doing his job. If you don’t like what they’re doing, don’t send Marines into war.”

<snip>

But the whispering continued, and Hackett was troubled. “It creates doubt and suspicion,” Hackett told me, saying his close supporters were asking him privately about the rumors. “It tarnishes my very strength as a candidate, my military service. It’s like you take a handful of seeds, throw them up in the wind, and they blow all around and start growing. It really bothered me.”

<snip>

Hackett was infuriated by the subterfuge. “I felt like I got fucked by the Democratic Party because they enticed me in and then they pulled the rug out from beneath me. It sounds eerily familiar to sending in the military to Iraq, which was a misuse of the military, and then not giving them what they need to fight.”

<snip>

Hackett, who says he would still like to help “retool” the Democratic Party, ends his meteoric political career with some advice for other maverick candidates. “They simply can’t rely on any of the party infrastructure to help them, and they must assume that people at high levels will work against them. These guys,” he says of the party insiders, “view the Senate as a club. They’re not gonna welcome you if one day they turn the key on the clubhouse door and you are sitting there with your feet on the table flippin’ them the middle finger. I understand that from their perspective. It works for them, but not for the rest of us out here.”

The last paragraph says it all for so many of us.

I know we've refrained from airing some of our dirtiest laundry in this forum to date. Now that media organizations have opened the can of worms, we may as well be honest about it.

The smears happened, I heard them with my own ears. It's made me sick not to talk about them, as sick as it made me to hear them, and honestly, I suspect the Republicans are behind the whole goddamned thing, which is why I thought it shouldn't be brought up. I still feel that the photo smear came from outside, regardless of any conclusion Mother Jones draws.

But it's more or less out in the open now, even though most of you know we've been walking on eggshells about the whole "photos" issue.

on edit: added paragraph beginning "Hackett, who says he..."