You win a cookie ...
Posted on 07/18/2012 3:06:17 AM PDT by iowamark
You may recall a Daily Caller piece from earlier this year that exposed the odd behavior of Media Matters founder David Brock as the reincarnation of Mel Gibson’s character in the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory. As a refresher, here’s a typical day in the life:
David Brock was smoking a cigarette on the roof of his Washington, D.C. office one day in the late fall of 2010 when his assistant and two bodyguards suddenly appeared and whisked him and his colleague Eric Burns down the stairs.
Brock, the head of the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for America, had told friends and co-workers that he feared he was in imminent danger from right-wing assassins and needed a security team to keep him safe.
The threat he faced while smoking on his roof? “Snipers,” a former co-worker recalled.
“He had more security than a Third World dictator,” one employee said, explaining that Brock’s bodyguards would rarely leave his side, even accompanying him to his home in an affluent Washington neighborhood each night where they “stood post” to protect him. “What movement leader has a detail?” asked someone who saw it.
When Brock isn’t meeting cloaked men at park benches and cooing into the dark to give the “all clear”, he’s running yet another Soros-funded group known as American Bridge. American Bridge is a Super PAC (which in this instance must not be the worst type of organization in history as the left usually labels SuperPACs) and currently employs roughly 17 campaign trackers as of May 2012 and were expected to hire at least 5 more in June.
There’s been a lot of hubbub in the news lately about trackers. The DCCC actually appears to be working to cover up the embarrassing way in which some trackers are doing their jobs from stalking candidate homes to catching Romney in his Mucaca moment when he uttered the offensive word “y’all“.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with campaign trackers. Sending people out to campaigns armed with cameras to catch candidates slipping up is a practice which I wholeheartedly support as YouTube is quickly becoming the single greatest source for opposition research. But it is a bit amusing that Brock would so readily employ people to stalk candidates considering the shadows he undoubtedly runs screaming from on a daily basis.
So how creepy are the tactics being employed by some trackers that American Bridge readily acknowledges they are following?
Trackers assigned to California GOP candidate Ricky Gill, a highly touted challenger to Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney, pushed the edge of the envelope even further.
In May, a clip of Gill’s parents’ Lodi, Calif., mansion appeared online. The one-minute video shows the front of the huge home, a gated fence and vast front yard. The next month brought a three-minute video that begins by slowly passing by Gill’s home, with a cameraman overheard saying, “This is the house that he’s been registered to vote in since 2005.”
About one minute in, the video shifts to the University of California-Berkeley, campus, where the 25-year-old Gill recently finished studying law. The tracker waits in a hallway where Gill soon appears. As the candidate walks outside, the tracker follows in clandestine pursuit.
[...]
“I think your family or your personal life should be off-limits unless it enters the campaign,” said Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci, who said a neighbor informed him that a tracker had been crouching in the bushes taking footage of the first-term congressman’s home. “It’s hard for my neighbors or my family to get comfortable when someone is in the bushes.”
His Wadsworth, Ohio, home is the subject of a 49-second video, which pans from a view of the mailbox on the left side of the house to the shrubbery on the right and then back and forth several times before cutting off.
As Moe noted, this is with the endorsement of the Democrat party:
“Democrats, on the other hand, insist the videos are fair game — and are unapologetic about the hardball tactics.” The videos are apparently being sponsored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (at least, that’s how I’m interpreting DCCC spokesman Jesse Ferguson’s defiant defense of the practice); certainly there seems to be a common format, and it’s been done in multiple locations at this point. Which basically means that the DCCC is out and out stalking the Republican party.
You’d think that a man heading up an organization which decries SuperPACS, even as he simultaneously heads an organization that enjoys that tax status, would be noteworthy when discussing the activities of that organization. You might also think that that same man hiding in bunkers and ducking from imaginary sniper fire while simultaneously employing dozens of people to follow others around for over a year, might be noteworthy when writing about what those trackers are doing. If you’re a national media outlet like Politico, you’d disagree with these conclusions as even with all of that background data, they don’t mention at all who is behind the “recently surfaced” videos showing trackers going a bit farther than the normal campaign tracking.
Because why would anyone care about an Obama-connected, paranoid, delusional, Soros-funded, crazy person filming candidates at their houses and sending the videos to the Democrat party when there’s Romney’s departure from a company 13 years ago to consider? Priorities people!
Thanks iowamark.
Is Eric Burns the guy that used to be on FOX???
“David Brock’s Paranoia”
I suspect AIDS-inflicted dementia.
Can someone tell me why this is not trespassing, voyeurism, stalking, & a violation of privacy? In Castle Doctrine states, can I shoot these creeps when I find them in my yard?
I remember a conversation I had with a Dem friend when Bush II was still president. This was shortly after the passage of the Patriot Act. My friend was convinced government agents might be listening to his/our conversation. Of course millions of libs were screaming about violated “rights” and that thousands if not millions of dissidents were going to be tossed in jail. I want to ask these people how many innocent people were then tossed in the klink because of the Patriot Act. If you can say zero, you might win a cookie.
You win a cookie ...
Maybe it needs to be turned around and start following and filming the guys in the bushes. Take it to their home.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.