Alex Knepper sums up why J.D. Hayworth would be a bad choice for Arizona, for the Tea Party movement, for the Republican party, and for America:
In case anyone has forgotten, J.D. Hayworth is the man who used his PAC money to pay his wife a six-figure sum, and was the top recipient of illicit loot from the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He’s the man who broke his term-limits pledge as a congressman and actually had the gall to repeat the same pledge as he entered the Senate race.
He appeals to birthers. He’s the man who promises to break with his party in the right way, unlike McCain — and yet he voted for the unsustainable Medicare, Pt. D expansion that McCain voted against. He’s the man who voted for the infamous pork-stuffed Highway Bill of 2005 — the bill containing the notorious Bridge to Nowhere. By Levin’s own standards, isn’t Hayworth a statist?
Hayworth was knee-deep in the Abramoff scandal which embroiled the Republican House leadership during the second Bush term. The fall from grace of lobbyist Jack Abramoff led a number of congress members to return hundreds of thousands of dollars to Native American tribes who had been essentially swindled by Abramoff and his cronies in Washington. The scandal led to the downfall of House majority leader Tom DeLay, who was a little too cozy with Abramoff for his own good. Some of the money Hayworth received from Abramoff went to pay his wife a six-figure income to head his political action committee.
Now Hayworth is threatening McCain, warning him that if he brings up the Abramoff scandal Hayworth will rehash the Keating Five controversy which almost ended McCain’s political career in the 1980’s. Since this was fairly well delved into in the 2008 campaign, I’m not sure McCain has much to lose from this bargain.
So far Hayworth has run an ugly campaign, lambasting McCain as a liberal and a fraud, and complaining that McCain is running a “scorched earth campaign” against him. Arizona voters need only scratch beneath the surface to see that the only person Hayworth would represent in the U.S. Senate would be himself. Whatever McCain’s flaws, he has served most of his career with honor.
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