Scratch a republican moderate and underneath, you find an enabler of the worst, most corrupt rightwing extremists

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Freshman republican candidate Mike Fitzpatrick held a press conference with Iraq vets.

Two of them attacked Fitzpatrick's democratic opponent, bronze star awarded Iraqi war veteran Patrick Murphy, accusing him of claiming to be a veteran of military action he didn't see.

Later, Fitzpatrick rejected the accusations.

This is a transparent, pathetic Swiftboat job.

Everyone in the county knew that Murphy would be swiftboated. I'm sure dozens of people, as did I, told Murphy to be ready for a swiftboat attack because he was a JAG in Iraq. After all, if Max Cleland, who lost multiple limbs in combat could be swiftboated, then Patrick could expect it as normal republican sleaze politics. It was expected that some right wing extremist group, funded by a wealthy right winger would independently sponsor swiftboat attack ads similar to the ones used on John Kerry and Max Cleland.

But I don't think anyone expected it to be such an obvious, transparent, direct attack. clearly orchestrated by Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick must be either weak on pull or stupidly following bad instructions, because it just plain looks incredibly sleazy the way he had the Iraq vets show up at his press conerence, nastily attacking Murphy and then rejecting their attacks.

This is a local story with a national message.

Fitzpatrick is one of the faces the Republican party has been trying to portray as moderate. The party bosses give him a pass about a third of the time when votes are not close, and on issues his more moderate to liberal constituency hold dear, like the environment. But the truth is, Fitzpatrick is there when it comes to the tough battles, when every Republican vote is needed. He's there providing the republican majority that maintains control over the house, control of committees that fail to investigate ethics problems, fail to investigate abuses of power, fail to investigate corporate abuses, fail to investigate abuses of prisoner rights, torture, contracts not put out for bid, failures involving Katrina-- the list is incredibly long.

Fitzpatrick is a typical Republican candidate who, while presented as a nice family guy, just pulled a sleazy, nasty, incredibly transparent move-- allowing his opponent to be Swiftboated totally inappropriately. At least, when he allowed "swiftboat attacks upon his first opponent two years ago, he didn't set up the attack with a press conference. He failed to reject, criticize or disown outrageous attacks then. So this time, he does reject the message... after setting up the delivery of the message. Kind of like the old Republican hit ad on Kerry-- first he rejected the $87 billion, then he approved it.

what a joke. It's really very similar to his efforts to distance himself from his close relationship with Bush and the Republican culture of corruption. This is a pattern we will see all across the country.

Fitzpatrick is the pretty face of the Republican party. He is one of many good ol'boy and gal cheerleader type Republican candidates in congressional districts across the USA who represent the Republican party's last hope-- personality politics.

The problem is, even with nice people, good family, good, moral Republican representatives do bad things. They enable corrupt criminals like DeLay, Cunningham, and the rest of the extremists on the take to evade investigation, to head committees, to approve billions of dollars in handouts to corporate cronies.

Mike Fitzpatrick ran a press conference that allowed his dirty, sleazy cronies to put out a nasty attack message. Then he gutlessly, speciously and dishonestly backed away and said, pooh, pooh. I don't approve. Across America, the Fitzpatricks of the Republican party are going to be playing this same shell game-- pretending they differ from Bush, pretending they aren't a part of the Republican problem that has dropped Bush's approval rating to 33%, pretending they don't welcome the swiftboat attacks that the Republican party has budgeted over $60 million for advertising to spew into our living rooms.

It's time to clean house, and that means getting rid of every enabler of Republican control of the congress. Only then will it be possible to do the urgent investigations this country so desperately needs.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

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Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

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