[TheOtherOne]

The mayor said he deliberated for months about how to fend off the rumors and could not come up with a workable strategy.

"The cowardly and hurtful, insidious and vicious nature of this sort of character smear is that there is so little that you can do to defend your family and the integrity of your marriage against these sorts of attacks without aiding those whose primary goal is to spread these falsehoods," he said. "It's a very insidious thing." "I don't put up with this," Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said of rumors being spread about the Baltimore mayor. Steffen discussed the rumors on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com during the summer of 2004. He posted them under the name NCPAC, a reference to one of his early employers, the National Conservative Political Action Committee.

[lawetzel]

The main point here isn't that rumors were flying about Mayor O'Malley, although I find that deplorable, but rather that they have been going around for 5 years. O'Malley waited until he had a strategic moment to pin the blame on an Ehrlich employee to make a fuss about the rumors. O'Malley does everything that he does in a calculated move toward the governor's race (and he has his eye on that big office in DC). I'm from Baltimore and have watched this guy with dread for a while now.