Extra! Extra! Read All About It! Congressional Candidate Allows Non-Registered Voters to Assist With Campaign!
Powerline, Michelle Malkin, Ian Schwartz and too many other to count are in a tizzy over Congressional candidate Francine Busby’s statement that “Everybody can help, yeah, absolutely, you can all help. You don’t need papers for voting, you don’t need to be a registered voter to help.”
Read in context, it is clear what Busby is saying: you don’t to have to have “papers for voting,” i.e., a voter registration card, to assist with her campaign. But in their overzealous desire to “gotcha” a Democrat, many of my fellow conservatives are all too eagerly reading the phrase “you don’t need papers for voting” in a vacuum, as if to suggest Busby was answering a question about who can vote rather than who can help with her campaign. Granted, the guy whose question she answered had pretty much admitted to being an illegal alien, not the kind she ought to have been recruiting for her campaign. Still, failing to police the legality of volunteers’ status is a pretty minor offense compared to encouraging voter fraud.
Patterico has more.
UPDATE: Et tu, FoxNews. Today Carl Cameron told viewers Busby had said “you don’t need papers to vote.” Ugh.
June 5th, 2006 at 1:39 am
Some of our friends on the right are turning into SNL paradoies of themselves.
June 7th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Fair enough. It’s all water under the bridge now, anyway. I did catch a snippet of Cathy Crowley on the radio, about an hour ago, citing this remark as one of the reasons Ms. Busby lost, though.
June 7th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
Xrlq nails it again…
As I was making the rounds on the blog circuit, I had to say out loud (even though no one else is home) “Yeah!” to this post of his. I was thinking of writing a brief post on this myself,……