I wonder how much we'll be hearing of this news in the political press and how much Marylanders will from their MSM:
Rep. Benjamin Cardin has fired a campaign staffer who wrote racially charged comments on an Internet blog against his opponent, Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, Cardin's campaign confirmed Saturday.
The blog includes a reference to "Devouring the Competition" by eating Oreo cookies, which Steele has said people threw at him during a 2002 debate as a slight directed at his race and political views.In a statement, Cardin also condemned "anti-Semitic" comments written by the female staffer on her own Internet blog [formerly at persuasionatrix.blogspot.com].
One important fact left out of the AP report I quoted above is that the story was broken by our friends over at Wizbang. AP reporter Brian Witte's behavior in this instance is all too familiar. Blogs are often not given the proper credit they deserve for reporting, especially if they're conservative ones.
The AP reporter also seems to have been tricked by the Cardin campaign into thinking that the staffer, identified by Wizbang's Kevin Aylward as one Ursula Gruber, was low level. In an update post, Aylward quotes several of the Cardin staffer's blog posts which state that she is on the "senior staff," including this one:
I'm based out of campaign headquarters, right outside of Baltimore, so it's not like before where I was off in the middle of nowhere with only a few coworkers who were either useless or didn't like me a whole lot. This is an awesome bunch, and with the finance, press, field, GOTV, fundraising and volunteer coordinators all in the same office, you get a much better mix of people.
There are drinking games and nonsense, and gleeful exclaiming over the Chipotle online ordering (it's 30 minutes away, so we put together a giant order and send the interns).
There are definite perks to starting as senior staff. I show up and everyone listens, I don't have to do the majority of the grunt work or obnoxious calls. I have interns for that.
Now that it's hit the AP, one wonders if the Washington Post, obsessed of late with attacking Virginia GOPer George Allen for allegedly racist remarks, will pick the Persuasionatrix story
up.
I'm not holding out hope it will give it as much play as it gave the MD4Bush story which involved a Republican staffer getting fired for internet postings. [The Post soon shied away from the story after it was revealed its own reporter worked in collusion with Democrats to gain access to the staffer's FreeRepublic account.]
