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"Do you realize that if the Republican Party leadership had gotten behind Bill Simon, most all of this could have been avoided? That’s rhetorical... The guy almost pulled it out, with almost no federal or state leadership help."

Oh, that's a sore spot. I was peripherally involved in his primary campaign, which was a brilliant piece of street warfare. We crushed LA's leftish RINO mayor Dick "Dick" Riordan, the establishment's choice, and even delivered the SF Bay Area to Simon's column. In reminder that conservatism works, Simon's astonishing primary victory was leavened by an unusual turnout of folks attracted by his Reaganesque message, real-world business accomplishments and unrelentingly upbeat attitude. Memories of his supremely principled dad didn't hurt, either.

But rather than consolidating power the day after the primary, Simon went on vacation and off the grid. When he came back from laying on the beach, he was Bill Who? again, a mere hood ornament on an operation that bore little resemblance to his primary team. With Simon not paying attention, Parsky and his pack of RINOs flushed the folks who had brilliantly executed Simon's guerrilla primary campaign, replacing them with nosepicking professional do-nothings who wouldn't rock the boat.

Meanwhile, that quintessential attention-whore Riordan sat petulantly on his perch, toying with the press by saying he might endorse Davis. And little old me, courtesy of a sympathetic intel professional, provided the campaign with a dossier eighteen pages thick regarding some troublesome backstory on some creep named Hindelang who'd been kicked out of a Simon-funded venture for serious chicanery and was, to my eye, maneuvering to cause trouble. With all my primary-campaign contacts out on their asses, I could not get the attention of anyone in the general campaign. No one in Parsky's hand-picked operation saw any urgency, and the campaign just drifted along, lacking the least message or direction and with Simon squelched by his handlers to Ken-doll status. And sure enough, Davis and his flying monkeys got a cooperative judge to fast-track Hindelang's bogus charges and render a convenient fraud verdict against Simon a few days before the election. It was quickly reversed--Hindelang was the crook, not Simon--but you'd never know it from the headlines. "Simon convicted of fraud!"

And that was that. There's blame enough to go around:

o Simon's vanity, sense of entitlement and rookie naivete,

o Parsky's team's corrupt misfeasance,

o The California GOP's Pablum addiction,

o Riordan's childish petulance,

o Davis' predictable sleaze...

Bottom line: California turned its back on a fair Jeffersonian Goldwaterite with real business talent and an impressive endorsement by the then-white-hot Rudy Giuliani, his good friend and fellow former Reagan DOJ official. Actually, if you take L.A. County out of the equation, Simon won the state handily. (Thanks, Dick.) The state's population distribution is such that he who wins L.A. wins the state.

Simon's loss set the stage for RINOnegger to swish into office and girly the place up. We'll be paying for that for generations... at least until another Reagan, or a savvier Simon, comes to the fore.

I hadn’t realized it was so bad the RINO leadership submarined Simon’s campaign crew with RINO replacements. Good grief!

I’m going to have to agree that Simon was at fault to let them, but I also have to admit guys like him (and a lot of folks here) just don’t have a clue how destructive the Republican leadership in the state has been over the years.

You can fault Simon, but how is he to know? Honest people who keep their noses to the grind-stone and work hard, just don’t get a chance to keep an eye on the traitors in the party.

He probably thought he was getting the best team possible, and it would be down-hill from there. Little did he know.

Those rat bastards in Sacramento, are donkeys to the max. (The Republican Leadership that is.)

Thanks for your insight.