Get to know Steve Stockman

Seismosaurus said:
Whilst I like to hope that few Republicans believe in this level of extremism, it certainly does appear that that this level of extremism drives the party. Moderate Republicans may not believe in it, but they absolutely do appear to pander to it, pay lip service to it - and, increasingly, go along with it.
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Sadly, moderate Republicans don't vote in the primaries as often or regularly as their more extreme brethren. Until the moderates and pragmatists in the GOP begin to stand up against nuts like this, they're going to run the show... and they're going to continue to run the GOP's prospects into the ground on the national level.
 
MattusMaximus said:
Sadly, moderate Republicans don't vote in the primaries as often or regularly as their more extreme brethren. Until the moderates and pragmatists in the GOP begin to stand up against nuts like this, they're going to run the show... and they're going to continue to run the GOP's prospects into the ground on the national level.
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There aren't many moderate Republicans in Texas. The guy Stockman is running against, Cornyn, is rated the second most conservative Congressman. And even that's not crazy enough for some Texans. Fortunately, Stockman is not given much of a chance to win, especially with all the ammunition Cornyn has against him.
 
Tricky said:
There aren't many moderate Republicans in Texas. The guy Stockman is running against, Cornyn, is rated the second most conservative Congressman. And even that's not crazy enough for some Texans. Fortunately, Stockman is not given much of a chance to win, especially with all the ammunition Cornyn has against him.
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"Conservative" ain't enough any more. You have to be able to bury the needle on radical rhetoric in order to get the base's juices flowing.
 
The Don said:
Yiiiikes :eek:

Obviously this character is not probably typical of the candidates that the Tea Party support or his views have been deliberately misrepresented or quoted out of context or even if they are accurate and he is a typical Tea party candidate he's only one man and doesn't represent the Tea Party or GOP.

Fringe beliefs exist in all societies but to an outside observer the GOP seems to be pandering rather too much to their fringe.
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Well and accurately observed. I prefer, for the sake of accuracy however, referring to it as bending over for their fringe.
 
Ok, he threatened to sue and to file criminal charges.

Steve Stockman, meet, Barbara Striesand. Here is your mug shot, Steve, here is a picture of your house, Barb.

Enjoy.
 
Ziggurat said:
Are all your predictions this accurate?
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I'm generally a pessimist so sometimes I'm right to underestimate humans and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.

Color me pleasantly surprised.
 
Travis said:
I'm generally a pessimist so sometimes I'm right to underestimate humans and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.

Color me pleasantly surprised.
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Stockman never really had a chance. Cornyn had much more funding and vastly superior organization. And Stockman didn't really try. He gave no interviews and made no public appearances. His "campaigning" was limited to sending out vicious slander through the mail. He was so insane that even the far right Republicans refused to endorse him. And yet he still got 20%. I find that more scary than comforting.
 
Tricky said:
Stockman never really had a chance. Cornyn had much more funding and vastly superior organization. And Stockman didn't really try. He gave no interviews and made no public appearances. His "campaigning" was limited to sending out vicious slander through the mail. He was so insane that even the far right Republicans refused to endorse him. And yet he still got 20%. I find that more scary than comforting.
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It helps to put it in perspective, Mel Reynolds was indicted for sexual abuse of a minor campaign worker and was re-elected, Jesse Jackson Jr disappeared from public view in June, his offices were raided in October and was re-elected two weeks later, Jon Stroger was clinically dead when he was re-elected!

In light of that, I am sure we can all consider this knucklehead's landslide defeat very comforting.
 
Goodbye Steve, we hardly knew ye.

Is the Tea Party losing its mojo?

Dave Weigel:

How the Texas Tea Party became nothing more than an effort to take people’s money

Stockman didn’t run a Senate campaign. He ran a kamikaze mission with no fuel, map, or targets. He lied relentlessly, often through a Twitter account ghost-written by his spokesman and always in a manner that could be debunked with a quick phone call or Googling. Stockman claimed to have won “Tea Party straw polls” that were held months earlier. His campaign sites (which accepted bitcoin donations, naturally) featured a chintzy Photoshop that made it look like Cornyn had hugged Obama, and a list of “past and present endorsements,” one of them from an activist who’d been dead for most of 2013.

Days before the election, Stockman claimed an endorsement from “the head of one of the biggest Tea Party groups in America.” Jenny Beth Martin, the head of Tea Party Patriots, had not endorsed him. She’d given a nice quote about him to WND—in December.

Actually, if you’d been following Stockman’s race on WND, Tuesday’s result would have stunned you. The conservative news site reported that Stockman was following a “Cruz missile” strategy and closing the gap with Cornyn, citing one Human Events/Gravis poll that ended up missing the result by 25 points. Jerome Corsi, the author of the investigative journalism classic Where’s the Birth Certificate?, endorsed Stockman and wrote credulous WND columns about his race. Stockman had blown off Texas reporters and made no public campaign appearances since January. He gave Corsi an exclusive interview.

The broader right has an uneasy relationship with Corsi and WND. It’s not just that the site obsessively covered conspiracies about President Obama’s citizenship or that it bought billboards to advance the conspiracies. It’s that the site twins conservative news with get-rich-quick, survive-the-apocalypse, buy-buy-buy ad scams. Eric Hoffer’s theory that every political cause becomes a “business, then eventually degenerates into a racket,” is proved every day at WND. It’s proved in less noticeable ways on the email lists of defeated presidential candidates like Herman Cain that have been sold to quacks.

Stockman was a uniquely incompetent scammer, but he didn’t have the field to himself. The danger of “scoreboard” politics, of choosing big targets, is that you’ll likely lose. The upside is that you’ll definitely raise money. The Stockman race was a cruder, less ethical version of the Tea Party Leadership Fund’s promise to “Defeat Boehner.” Sure, the speaker of the House is even safer than Cornyn, but the Tea Party Leadership Fund has raised millions and kicked back most of it to consultants.

And the “Defeat Boehner” campaign is mirrored by FreedomWorks, the Washington-based Tea Party group that’s running its own “Fire the Speaker” campaign. The first time most national reporters heard of the Pierson-Sessions race was when FreedomWorks brought her to Washington, and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe called her “one of the best activists in Texas.”
According to the Federal Election Commission’s records of independent expenditure, FreedomWorks spent no money on Pierson’s race. In the last week, the Conservative Campaign Committee spent around $16,000. The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund spent around $5,000, having endorsed Pierson officially on Monday—the day before the primary. But FreedomWorks spent elsewhere. I asked what the group had done in Texas’s primaries and got no response.
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So a lot of these Tea Party groups are keeping the funds they raise for themselves or consultants and not spending it on ads and stuff like that which cost money.
 
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