Posted on 08/07/2004 7:24:44 PM PDT by Graybeard58
I want to say up front that I think SAS is a great organization and has many dedicated people working on second amendment issues.
His meaning has always been obvious to me.
These are the kinds of things that make me see him as a mixed bag. If hell froze over and he won this race, would we hear more of that sort of nasty rhetoric aimed at the President, not in World Net Daily, but from the Senate floor?
Some one will be right along to tell you you're wrong.
Is this announcement going to be covered by the networks? It's less than 50 minutes away and I can't find it on TV!! CNN is running some slop about Tom Cruise and Fox is talking about Pakistan!! What's the matter with this country??
You likely would, as well as regular diatribes against his cohorts, Republican and Democrat, in the Senate.
Keyes, like Ron Paul, marches to a different drummer.
He thinks, however, that it's everyone else who is playing off key.
It doesn't revolve around Senate candidate announcements. John Cornyn never got a bit of coverage when announcing for Senate here in Texas three years ago.
I think this is exactly the kind of thing one poster was concerned about when he compared Keyes to McCain.
I don't like McCain. Sometimes he's great, and sometimes (like with the swift vets) he is horrible.
Apples and oranges, sinkspur.
Where did Cornyn live when he announced that he would run for the Senate in Texas?
This is a national campaign with national significance!
Stay calm. : )
I don't like McCain either, but I'm not sold on the SwiftVets.
I happen to think that anything having to do with the war on terror, good or bad, helps Bush. I also think that anything having to do with Vietnam, good or bad, helps Kerry.
The Swiftvets are not going to help Bush with this campaign, at all, and could hurt him.
We're not going to beat Kerry arguing over Vietnam. There's plenty of other juicy stuff to take him to task over.
Not it's not. Not even close.
You must be a dyed-in-the-wool Keyster.
The country does not revolve around Alan Keyes, scenic, no matter how much you wished it did.
McCain seemed to be one of the first to tie, without evidence, the swift vets to President Bush.
His bitterness over his own experience with the Bush campaign is clear; he is still carrying a grudge against the man who beat him in the primaries.
I think some of Keyes' remarks about the President ("the bullet that kills you") make it obvious that he carried a grudge for a long time, too.
I hope he's been able to rise above it. McCain sure hasn't.
We're not going to beat Kerry arguing over Vietnam. There's plenty of other juicy stuff to take him to task over.
For all his smarts, the guy doesn't seem to know the first thing about how to manage a campaign.
Source for state tax is private conversation with top Keyes aide - and published reports saying the same thing. I don't have those at hand.
The source for the presidential campaign debt info is, again, private conversation with top Keyes aide over the course of years of close work with that aide and Dr. Keyes himself, throughout the period of the campaigns and after. No, I did not have a position in finance at the national level, but was treasurer of the California campaign in '96. I have been involved chiefly as an advisor to Keyes (not that he takes much advice!) and, more often, to his chief of staff. I also have written lots of the campaign material, drafted public statements, etc.
Let me repeat, though, that I am not claiming close knowledge of the campaign debt, but reporting what I remember being told several times by the person who has heroically supervised the decade-long attempt to keep the shoe-string Keyes operation in conformity with the absurd, servile, Byzantine, tyrannical and arbitrary FEC dance. The burden on a grass roots effort under media scrutiny to keep in close conformity with FEC diktats is overwhelming, and in our case it ended up draining the time and energy of our most talented national staff, because we never had money to hire the kind of professionals that the establishment candidates could afford. I think that the actual situation is that much of the remaining debt is deferred salary to the key person who spent most of her highly skilled professional time FOR YEARS filling out FEC forms to the detriment of the campaign itself. The FEC requires grassroots campaigns to have professional quality bookkeeping, and now the expenses of that bookkeeping, deferred at the time because there was much more important stuff to spend donations on, are left on the books as "campaign debt" of which the FEC demands continual monitoring
The final absurdity is that, as suggested in my first post, simple forgiveness of such debt is not only not allowed -- it is a serious violation of campaign finance law. Think about it - if I give a candidate some good or service, worth scores of thousands of dollars, and say that I will take "deferred payment," and then forgive that debt, I have in fact made a contribution scores of times greater than the maximum campaign donation limit.
Again, I don't plan on defending the factual truth of all this - I'm not with the Keyes organization officially now, and will let them answer this question as they choose. These are my personal opinions based on long and close experience with the campaigns.
Why am I not surprised that you have a problem with Alan Keyes, the most articulate conservative around?
Of course. He knows it works in his favor. That's why Bush stated emphatically he will never criticize Kerry's Vietnam service.
I'll get blasted for this, but Republicans would be smart to distance themselves from the Swiftvets. Don't get on stage with them, and don't have them speak at campaign events.
They can say whatever they want, and they may be right, but they don't help Bush, at...all!
You can bet they won't be at the GOP convention.
I agree wholeheartedly. The negatives on that issue far outweigh the positives, even if we are factually correct.
You're not a "lockstepper"?? Could've fooled me - - - isn't that why you're criticizing Keyes, because he's not a lockstepper? Only locksteppers get your approval, apparently.
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