Hackett Should Tell Democrats To Piss Up A Rope

Democrat and Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett became famous last year for narrowly losing a Congressional race in a heavily Republican district in Ohio to Jean Schmidt. He has since made a name for himself by correctly referring to our Deserter-In-Chief as a "chickenhawk" and a "sonuvabitch." Until recently, the Democratic Party establishment loved Hackett, who entered the Ohio Senate race last October. But seven-term Akron Democrat Rep. Sherrod Brown entered the same race shortly thereafter -- despite representations that he would not do so -- and that caused the party to ultimately betray Hackett.

This Mother Jones article gives some good background on how the Democrats got Hackett to drop his Senate bid, and some of it ain't pretty:

With Brown, a party insider, on board, the Democratic establishment quickly began pulling away from the fiery Hackett. Schumer, after having wooed him in August, called again in October. “Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive,” Hackett told me at the time. “But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do.” Hackett, a maverick who relishes the fight, decided to buck the Beltway insiders, and stay in the race.

Hackett’s scorching rhetoric earned him notoriety and cash on the campaign trail. He declared that people who opposed gay marriage were "un-American." He said the Republican party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden." Bloggers loved him, donors ponied up, while Democratic Party insiders grumbled that he wasn’t "senatorial."

Swift boats soon appeared on the horizon. A whisper campaign started: Hackett committed war crimes in Iraq—and there were photos. "The first rumor that I heard was probably a month and a half ago," Dave Lane, chair of the Clermont County Democratic Party, told me the day after Hackett pulled out of the race. "I heard it more than once that someone was distributing photos of Paul in Iraq with Iraqi war casualties with captions or suggestions that Paul had committed some sort of atrocities. Who did it? I have no idea. It sounds like a Republican M.O. to me, but I have no proof of that. But if it was someone on my side of the fence, I have a real problem with that. I have a hard time believing that a Democrat would do that to another Democrat."

In late November, Hackett got a call from Sen. Harry Reid. "I hear there’s a photo of you mistreating bodies in Iraq. Is it true?" demanded the Senate minority leader. "No sir," replied Hackett. To drive home his point, Hackett traveled to Washington to show Reid’s staff the photo in question. Hackett declined to send me the photo, but he insists that it shows another Marine—not Hackett—unloading a sealed body bag from a truck. "There was nothing disrespectful or unprofessional," he insists. "That was a photo of a Marine doing his job. If you don’t like what they’re doing, don’t send Marines into war."

A staffer in Reid’s office confirmed that Hackett had showed them several photos. "The ones I saw were part of a diary he kept while serving in Iraq and were in no way compromising. The one picture in question depicted Marines doing their work on what looked like a scorching day in Iraq," said the aide.

But the whispering continued, and Hackett was troubled. “It creates doubt and suspicion,” Hackett told me, saying his close supporters were asking him privately about the rumors. "It tarnishes my very strength as a candidate, my military service. It’s like you take a handful of seeds, throw them up in the wind, and they blow all around and start growing. It really bothered me."

Although Hackett says that he's done with politics for the time being, I'm hoping he changes his mind and decides to run for the Senate seat as an independent. He certainly doesn't owe anything to the bastards who are currently running the Democratic Party.

Would I be upset if Hackett spoiled the Democrats' chance of gaining this particular Senate seat? No, I wouldn't. In fact, I'd laugh my ass off if that happened.