Sadly, it seems that if Der Trumpenführer's lips are moving (or if he is tweeting), there is an extremely high probability that he is lying. This certainly holds true with his effort to slander Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam who Trump and a seemingly desperate GOP candidate Ed Gillespie are falsely claiming voted to protect violent gangs. The effort seems aimed at (i) firing up the racist GOP base, and (ii) confusing undecided independent voters. When your policies are rightly viewed as toxic and you are losing in the polls, this has become the new standard practice of today's despicable Republican Party. Stated another way, when all else fails, lie about your opponent - and this from the party that claims to support "Christian values." LGBT and minority voters (as well as younger voters) need to turn out on election day and send Gillespie down to defeat. If these voting blocks fail to do this, they will have no one to blame but themselves as they see themselves disenfranchised by GOP efforts and/or subjected to license to discriminate laws. This election is just as important as last year's presidential election. The Washington Post looks at this shameless lying campaign on the part of Gillespie and Trump. Here are highlights:
The Virginia gubernatorial race is shaping up as an early test of two pressing political questions: Will Trump’s unique awfulness energize Democrats enough to break their midterm voter dropoff curse? And what sort of continuing political effect or potency will “Trumpism” have, now that Donald Trump is actually in the White House?
Virginia is a particularly intriguing staging ground for this test. That’s because the state’s demographic evolution — it is becoming more diverse, educated and suburban — is both pushing it slowly into the Democratic column and (you’d think) rendering it less and less fertile soil for Trumpist arguments.
Trump himself has now pumped a gusher of Trumpist sleaze into the Virginia contest. This attack is absurd. Ed Gillespie, the GOP candidate, has been running ads that make the similar claim that Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate, “voted in favor of sanctuary cities that let dangerous illegal immigrants back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13.” As lieutenant governor, Northam did cast a tiebreaking vote against a bill that would have prevented any locality from restricting the “enforcement of federal immigration laws.” But as FactCheck.org noted in debunking the attack, the vote was procedurally meaningless — the result of a tactical trick by Virginia Republicans that never would have had any impact other than creating fodder for an attack ad. Regardless, Virginia doesn’t have any sanctuary cities in this sense, a fact Gillespie himself has admitted. What’s more, this line questionably conflates undocumented immigrants with violent criminals, something that Trump himself underscored more emphatically by claiming that Northam is “fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs.” So Trump’s version is even sleazier and more dishonest than Gillespie’s rendition is. It appears that Gillespie probably wanted Trump to tweet this to juice up the GOP base. As James Hohmann explained in a good piece, Gillespie is increasingly leaning on culturally charged “Trumpist” issues, because he appears to have a “base problem.” Experts on Virginia politics have argued that all this is directed at the Trump wing of the GOP base in Virginia.
But, by tweeting on the race, Trump also creates risks for Gillespie. Trump’s approval rating in Virginia among those likely to vote in November is at an abysmal 33-59, and 60 percent say their opinion of him has gotten more negative.
[S]ome Democrats are worried that Gillespie could pull off a surprise win, because Democratic voters are not motivated enough by the race (some have argued that Northam is to blame for this problem). If so, the moral might end up being that Trumpism continues to energize the GOP base bigly, yet Trump’s presidency is in and of itself not motivating Democratic voters enough to overcome their insufficient attention to state-level contests and their tendency to turn out at lower levels in off-year and midterm elections.
Get out and vote on November 7, 2017, and vote for Ralph Northam, Mark Herring and Justin Fairfax!
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