Ex-Spy Is a Long Shot to Oust Schumer

The last time Gary Berntsen went after such a formidable adversary in hostile territory, he was commanding a small band of fellow spies and commandos in pursuit of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan after 9/11. After helping drive the Taliban from power, they tracked him to the mountains of Tora Bora, only to see him slip away.

Mr. Berntsen, a Long Island-bred C.I.A. operative who retired in 2005, decided earlier this year to try to serve his country in a new, and not exactly clandestine, way: by running for office.

While he spent his career influencing the politics of countries in the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America, he has next to no experience here at home. He did not even vote in the last presidential election.

But in his maiden campaign, Mr. Berntsen, 52, a Republican, has set out to bag the biggest game in New York: Charles E. Schumer, the state’s senior senator, whose fund-raising...

The previously unknown Mr. Berntsen’s fervent support from Tea Party groups, for whom Mr. Schumer is a symbol of everything wrong with government, won him the Republican Party’s designation as its preferred candidate this month. He faces a primary against Jay Townsend, a veteran political consultant from Cornwall-on-Hudson.

So far Mr. Berntsen has Republican leaders in New York and Washington cheering him on, but making no commitments of financial support. Indeed, in taking on Mr. Schumer, Mr. Berntsen would head into battle without anything like the firepower and air support that emboldened him as a spy. In Afghanistan, he wrote, he lugged a Rubbermaid trunk containing $8 million in government-issued $100 bills, which he used to buy trucks and warlords’ support. So far Mr. Berntsen’s campaign has reported raising less than $40,000...

Here’s something for his arsenal against chuckie

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2250111/posts

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/13/audio-schumer-in-2004-on-enhanced-interrogation-techniques/

Audio: Schumer in 2004 on enhanced interrogation techniques (bit of hypocrisy for his later calling for prosecutions for those doing waterboarding)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4CWk5LfoH0

“And I’d like to interject a note of balance here. There are times when we all get in high dudgeon. We ought to be reasonable about this. I think there are probably very few people in this room or in America who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake.

Take the hypothetical: If we knew that there was a nuclear bomb hidden in an American city and we believed that some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe, would give us a chance of finding that bomb before it went off, my guess is most Americans and most senators, maybe all, would say, Do what you have to do.

So it’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.”

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~Kate

I intend to send this ex-spy a check tomorrow.

Great!

He seems to be a little shy on portable graphics we can borrow or hotlink to in order to get the message out, so I grabbed the otherwise well-designed logo off the campaign website (my apologies to the designer and to Mr. Berntsen if I've offended them, and I will be more than happy to take the image down if they just ask me to) and whipped up a little .png file to use to decorate posts here and there to get the message out. It's a measly little 19k or so, so it should load relatively fast and not put a damper on anyone's web-browsing:

The direct url for the image is: http://i758.photobucket.com/albums/xx221/B_Oceander/Miscellaneous/Berntsen-for-Senate_logo_sm.png

Hope it helps, we need to give him all the support possible.

I know. It'll be a long uphill climb; however, I think the primary enemies we'll have to worry about are the Alinsky-trained left-wing groups that will be engaging in all manner of slander and subterfuge (and probably some outright vote-buying) and the unions that will be using hired thugs to coerce members, because, as far as the public-at-large goes, I've been making off-the-cuff anti-Obama and anti-Obamacare remarks around people (to gauge their reactions), and out of about 50 people who've actually reacted, only one has gotten her dander up and tried to defend the little s**t - everyone else has at least nodded in agreement. There are a heck of a lot of closet conservatives - at least fiscal conservatives, people who have had to manage their own family budgets and are finally getting too uncomfortable with the profligacy of the democrats/liberals.

We also have to be very, very careful not to let them trick us into arguing on the basis of their own unstated assumptions. My favorite is the argument that republicans/conservatives are hard-hearted because we want to take money away from those who have the least - e.g., unemployment - and we can't argue on that assumption because, if the assumption is granted, the conclusion necessarily follows. Instead, we have to argue that, contrary to the unstated assumptions made by the democrats/liberals, we want to make sure everyone gets more money, and we know 100% based on the results of the past two decades, ever since Reagan's morning in America, that the best way to get money to the poor and the lower-middle class is cutting taxes and removing oppressive, uneconomic regulation - both of which necessarily entail cutting government spending - and that we have the cold, hard facts of history to back us up; what's more, those same facts refute, jot and tittle, every aspect of the democrats'/liberals' economic policies.

The other thing he needs are a lot more graphics - both digital and hardcopy - that we can spread around everywhere we go. I'm starting with this one:

which I cobbled together from the campaign website's logo. It's a small file that loads quickly, so please feel free to borrow it or hotlink to it and use it liberally to decorate posts on whatever fora or other websites you frequent.

The other thing we need to do is to identify all the little interest groups, including liberal groups, that have festering grudges against Chucklehead, and make sure we inflame and aggravate those grudges.

...containing $8 million in government-issued $100 bills...

If I had been the City Desk editor of this paper and read this, my next move would be to ram the copy right down the writer's throat and kick his ass directly out the door.

Yes, I know what he was trying to say, but the first rule of news writing is to remember that "anything that can be misunderstood, WILL be misunderstood". I hate sloppy writing like this!

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