America’s dirtiest race of the political season is still not over. Supporters of tea party insurgent Chris McDaniel are hungry for evidence that incumbent Thad Cochran cheated to win the primary runoff election for Mississippi’s US Senate seat, and conservative blogger Charles C. Johnson of gotnews.com has been feeding their appetite. The only problem is that his source seems rather sketchy:
Jordan said the campaign agreed to pay (Stevie) Fielder $600, half up front for campaign work.
“He was paid for reimbursement for gas, driving people around, get out the vote work,” Russell said. “But he never completed any work for the second $300. He never provided any names and addresses of people he said he was getting to work. He waffled on providing names and addresses.”
Russell said the campaign’s “standard rate” for people knocking on doors and doing other GOTV work is “$25 a shift — $25 in the morning, then a lunch break, then $25 for the afternoon.”
“This is obviously a guy who is a liar, who sold his story to a blogger who’s openly proclaiming he will pay people to tell him a story,” Russell said. “… Most disturbing is (Johnson) is attempting to solicit pictures of Mrs. Rose Cochran in her nursing home, with a bounty up to $1,000.”
But facts be damned, because the tea party refuses to be ignored! Last Tuesday’s runoff is still creating aftershocks in the Mississippi Republican Party because McDaniel was a genuine grassroots favorite of Mississippi’s neoconfederates, who know all about lost causes. They are offended by the diversity of Cochran’s winning coalition and emboldened by the clearly-racist narratives of their new lost cause. And with McDaniel still unwilling to concede his loss, there seems to be no adult supervision in Mississippi’s tea parties. Here is Rachel Maddow talking about it all last night: