Gianforte wins in Montana
Ginaforte won, 50 to 44.
Why did he win, despite his being charged with misdemeanor assault? Some or all of the following:
(1) Two-thirds of the votes had already been cast, and so recent events had a limited ability to sway the result.
(2) Montanans think what he did is just fine.
(3) Montanans don’t like what he did, but they think it’s much less important than his politics.
(4) Montanans didn’t believe media reports of what happened, and think they were biased against Gianforte. Or they thnk he was set up.
As far as #4 goes, Gianforte certainly seems to be admitting wrongdoing. In his acceptance speech he said:
“When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it,” Gianforte told his supporters at his Election Night rally in Bozeman. “That’s the Montana way.”
Saying he was “not proud” of his behavior, he added, “I should not have responded the way I did, for that I’m sorry. I should not have treated that reporter that way, and for that I’m sorry, Mr. Ben Jacobs.”
I think that will probably be the end of it, except perhaps some sort of fine for misdemeanor assault.
Personally, I pick door # 3.
But I’m skeptical that this will entirely fade. I imagine it will be resurrected as needed in the future. It’s too valuable as ‘evidence’ that people on the right really are irredeemable deplorables.
Here’s an article with great insight into the Leftist/Liberal mind-set. I highly recommend it and it’s insights are relevant to this issue.
“A JERSEY GIRL DEFENDS ROBERT E. LEE”
Geoffrey Britain:
Oh, they’ll definitely trot it out again if and when they feel they need to.
Probably more (1) than anything else, but I also think that if there was no early voting, he wins anyway.
The actual charge as compared to the story the media were telling are at odds with one another, and it indicates to me that the witnesses were telling the police something different than the papers were printing. I am suspecting there is a video of that we are not being shown by the media, otherwise, based on the printed story, Gianforte should have been charged with felony assault, not misdemeanor.
I too suspect there’s a video. It was an interview with a video camaraman ready to record. I can’t imagine he didn’t start recording the instant it got interesting. After all that’s his job, what’s he’s paid to do and woe to the employee that let slips such an opportunity.
Since the FOX interviewer Acuna blamed Gianforte, if a video exists, it has to tell a different story than hers because if it backed it up, FOX would be drooling over the increased viewership it would bring.
BTW, last night in lengthy coverage of the incident, ABC did NOT cover Fox’s Acuna walking back the strangling charge nor cover that one witness later admitted to having a blocked view that allowed for just a glimpse of the altercation.
FOX’s new leadership are RINOs and you can bet that everyone in that organization has gotten the memo.
@Yancey – agree, probably more about #1. If the 2/3 of the votes are locked in, it takes a giant move on the latter third to have a big impact.
Hard to tell if he would have won anyway, as his margin was only 6%, last I looked – and they were still counting stragglers.
A little bit of 2, 3, and 4. Montana has been invaded by Californians but the invaders are still not the majority. Native Montanans are not going to get their knickers in a twist because a man lost his temper after being treated badly by a reporter. Especially not in these days.
IMO, things turned out just about right. But it’s likely that this will be used whenever possible by the MSM to show how brutish the Repubs are.
The first comment above, by Geoffrey Britain, has a link to a wonderful article at Front Page Mag. It is well worth reading.
Geoffrey left a comment upon the article, which is important enough to deserve a posting in its own right. Here I’ll quote only the first two paragraphs:
He quotes at length from the book “In Defense of Thomas Jefferson,” by William G. Hyland. (Use Amazon’s Advanced Search to find the book and reviews.)
I will add another reference: the History News Network article by Prof. Robert F. Turner. Prof. Turner was the chairman of a committee commissioned by some of Pres. Jefferson’s family to investigate the claim; among others on the committe was Prof. Paul Rahe, the only one who did not fully agree with the committee’s otherwise consensus that the claims were almost certainly unfounded.
I quote from the beginning of the article:
Prof. Turner goes on to examine the evidence. I have a copy of the entire article (with comments), which was published on HNN 7/1/02. Unfortunately HNN seems to have removed the article, and the investigation committee’s documentation appears to have vanished as well.
Wikipedia has an article about the controversy at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson—Hemings_controversy
It cites the committee’s report and links to it. Unfortunately the link is broken.
In the interest of thoroughness: Prof. Turner’s original article was published at
http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=825
That’s one of the best apologies from a politician I’ve seen.
Geoffrey Britain:
As a native southerner (and graduate of Washington & Lee University) I must thank you for providing that link to Ms Goska’s piece.
Watching these memorial statutes taken down – especially those of Lee- has been hard.
This is no different than the defacement and iconoclasty that took place 3400 years ago in ancient Egypt when Akhenaten’s successors began removing all traces of Egypt’s first flirtation with monotheism (the cult of Aten the sun god).
Some things never change, I guess.
The South gets hot during summertime but otherwise it’s not as bad as they say.