THE PENNSYLVANIA GOP…. It’s not as if one state Republican Party office is known for being especially well respected, but the Pennsylvania GOP seems to be competing for some kind of prize in absurdity.
A new e-mail making the rounds among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania this week falsely alleged that Mr. Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud,” and equated a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of their Jewish ancestors, who “ignored the warning signs in the 1930’s and 1940’s.”
At first blush, it was typical of the sorts of e-mails floating around with false, unsubstantiated and incendiary claims this year.
But where most of the attack e-mails against Mr. Obama have been mostly either anonymous or from people outside of mainstream politics, this one had an unusually official provenance: It was sponsored by the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s “Victory 2008” committee.
And it was signed by several prominent McCain supporters in the state: Mitchell L. Morgan, a top fund-raiser; Hon. Sandra Schwartz Newman, a member of Mr. McCain’s national task-force monitoring Election Day voting, and I. Michael Coslov, a steel industry executive.
After the email caused an uproar, leaders of the state party repudiated it, telling reporters that some of the email was “accurate,” but some of the attacks couldn’t “substantiated.”
This is the same Pennsylvania Republican Party that recently issued a press release describing Obama as “a terrorist’s best friend,” and the same Pennsylvania Republican Party that apparently was involved in promoting the Ashley Todd hoax.
That’s a lot of nonsense in a short period of time for one state party.
