Imagine that tens of thousands of mailers were sent out to potential identity thieves with your social security number on it, as well as your wife’s. If you’re Republican Congressman Bill Sali (R-Id.) you needn’t imagine.
The Idaho Democratic Party, desperate to knock off the Conservative stalwart, sent out a copy of a tax lien that Sali had against him twenty years ago with his social, as well as his wife’s, exposed on the mailer.
According to the Spokesman Review, State Democratic Executive Director Jim Hansen defended the ad saying, “He’s a public figure, it’s a public document. If he was going to be upset, he probably should have paid off his bills and his taxes.”
Of course, the bills were paid off, years ago, and the issue occurred before Sali was elected. If Hansen and the Idaho Democrats were so desperate they felt Democrat Walt Minnick, even with the support of groups like Planned Parenthood and Charlie Rangel’s National Leadership PAC, was losing due to his liberalism and D+ rating from the NRA, they could have at least blurred the Salis’ social security numbers. The failure to do so was either malicious or unforgivably incompetent.
Raising this issue shows the desperation within the Idaho Democrats to raise a twenty year old irrelevant issue. Since this lien, Sali’s constituents in Ada County elected him eight times to the State legislature, and his state has elected him to Congress since that time. Sali is neither the first nor the last person to run afoul of our complex and convoluted state and federal tax codes, particularly with fluctuating income. Rather than attacking the issues, the Idaho Democratic Party has viciously attacked the Congressman as well as Mrs. Sali.
Mind you, this is the same Democratic Party that treats Barack Obama’s recent association with William Ayers as irrelevant, and his sitting in a church where “God D— America” was preached from the pulpit for twenty years as an unbroachable subject, and pretends that it’s some coincidence that pictures of Marxist butcher Che Guevara hung in Obama campaign headquarters. Yet they decide to dig through the gutter of twenty year old tax liens and expose their political opponents to identity theft.
It marks a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party. This election has marked an escalation of Democratic Party rhetoric, and the lowering of our political debate, to do anything to win no matter how illegal, unethical, or dishonest. As Sean Connery’s character said in the Untouchables, “It’s the Chicago Way.” That’s what Obama has brought to the Democratic Party.
And so the Idaho Democratic Party is learning its lessons well, behaving like Chicago street thugs in their quest for power. It’s time for Idaho voters to rise up and show the Democrats that the Chicago Way is not the Idaho Way, and send Walt Minnick and his allies packing.
