As any regular Blue Jersey reader knows, last week our uber-leader Juan Melli caught the Kean Jr. campaign's press secretary posting comments where she pretended to be a disenchanted Democrat. It got a lot of coverage, but most folks considered it an isolated incident.
Not so! Apparently in NH-2 the policy director for Rep. Charlie Bass (R) decided to do a little astroturfing of his own on liberal blogs, and he too got caught.
A lead staffer in U.S. Rep. Charlie Bass' office resigned Tuesday after admitting to posting fake messages on political blogs.
Tad Furtado, the No. 2 staffer in Bass' Washington office, resigned after it was revealed that he posed as a Democrat on liberal blogs. Bass said that Furtado posed as a supporter of Bass opponent Paul Hodes but then discussed how difficult it would be to beat Bass.
It's a movement! The Republican Staffer Lying On The Internet movement! Not, surely, as good as the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree movement, but a pretty good one none-the-less.
The difference between the Bass campaign's response and the Kean Jr. campaign's response is the most telling, however. Kean Jr. stood up on TV and defended press secretary Jill Hazelbaker, and did nothing to determine whether she or anyone else in his campaign was playing dirty pool with the Internet.
Bass fired his policy director, someone described as "one of his most trusted staffers":
"Tad Furtado posted to political Web sites from my office without my knowledge or authorization," Bass said in a written statement. "I have referred this matter to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct for their review."
Staff members in Bass' Concord office said they were shocked to hear Furtado was responsible for the postings. He was described as a rising young star and one of the congressman's most trusted staffers.
The fact is that someone on Kean Jr.'s staff -- or to be generous someone with access to the Kean Jr. computers in his office -- engaged in sock puppetry and lied on a public forum to support his campaign. That's wrong. Charlie Bass knows what to do, but Tom Kean Jr. is strangely confused about the right course of action.
When will Kean Jr. stand up and be the "reformer" he likes to play on TV? When will he decide that political dirty tricks are wrong and to root out the wrongdoers in his campaign?
There's been a bit of silliness over at the Tom Kean Jr. campaign this past week. Xpatriated Texan of Blue Jersey discovered that a Kean Jr. attack on Senator Bob Menendez was patently untrue by unearthing a Jersey Journal article from 1996. Turns out that Menendez did get ethics committee approval for renting his property to a non-profit group he championed in Congress. Turns out that Menendez even rented it to them at less than market rate, costing him money.
The Kean Jr. folks were not happy about the truth coming out. To combat the evidence they started posting comments on Blue Jersey under made up names pretending to be former Democrats and liberals. Juan Melli -- the founder of Blue Jersey -- caught them by matching the IP address of the commenters to the IP address of Kean Jr. press secreatary Jill Hazelbaker's e-mail account.
That's been a front page newspaper, TV and radio story for a few days. Ooops.
But Hazelbaker wasn't done making mistakes. She also tried to paint Ellen Weintraub -- the ethics officer named in the Jersey Journal article as the one who cleared the rental -- as a partisan nut whose word could not be trusted. Unfortunately, Herb Jackson of the Bergen Record learned that in Weintraub's new job as a Federal Election Commissioner she had backed Kean Jr. in his complaint against Mike Ferguson based on cheating in the 2000 primary election for NJ7's Congressional seat.
It's not easy being Kean, is it? Or at least, not easy being a Kean spokesperson. First you have to explain why your candidate left the Budget Committee in Trenton before a budget crisis and then complained about the way the budget crisis was handled. Then the Vice President of the United States comes to New Jersey to raise money for your candidate and your guy hides in his car rather than be photographed with the VP. Next the families of military personnel try to ask your guy questions about his support for the Iraq War and you have to figure out a way to explain his hiding from that, too. And then, worst of all, you carefully manage a campaign to paint your opponent as ethically challenged and WHOOPS! some blogger spends an hour in the library and shows your whole campaign to be a pack of lies.
The Kean-Jr. campaign press secretary’s credibility is shot. Shot through the heart. And Jill Hazelbaker’s got herself to blame, because in the last 48 hours she has provably lied to the media no less than 3 times--and that gives her a bad name.
The Internet postings came from people calling themselves “cleanupnj,” “usedtobeblue” and “AmadeusNJ.” They said they were concerned Democrats, “lifelong liberals,” and they were troubled by the United States senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez…
But the liberal Democratic hosts of BlueJersey.com, the Web log where such comments were posted, smelled something fishy about the postings, and said they traced them to a computer inside the campaign headquarters of Mr. Menendez’s Republican opponent, Thomas H. Kean Jr.
Now on to the three Hazelbaker lies to the media...plus two “bonus Hazelbaker deceits that are really funny” at the end.
