Posted on 02/23/2014 9:40:20 AM PST by Kansas58
"OVERLAND PARK — U.S. Senate candidate Milton Wolf posted a collection of gruesome X-ray images of gunshot fatalities and medical injuries to his Facebook page and participated in online commentary layered with macabre jokes and descriptions of carnage."
(Excerpt) Read more at cjonline.com ...
Wow, that’s awful - outrageous to post that stuff to begin with, and amazingly stupid to leave it posted when you launch a Senate campaign.
This is why you don’t use Facebook. Period.
I’m sorry to say that if this is as it is being presented, and Wolf seems to have a hard time denying it, then he is done.
It’s just lucky that this isn’t the Graham or McConnell race.
I am not condoning the choice of what he posted on his Facebook account, but the article does say that it was taken down before his Senate candidacy launch.
This was probably dredged by the opposition research for the Senator he is challenging. Regardless, I don’t know squat else about him except to say that the Senator he is challenging got where he is by political know-how I guess. Likewise, I’m not up on anything about him either.
That’s why I been saying we don’t want to get rid of a pretty good conservative we know for an unknown. A Wolf in Tea Party clothing may be what we would be getting
Some here may recall that the late Tony Snow was a long time FReeper. His ID was "tony snow" Indeed, there was a daily thread for his radio show, and those who listened, and posted to it regularly called themselves "snowflakes." Snow would often reply to comments posted while he was on-air.
The morning I heard the announcement that he'd been appointed as W's press secretary, I was ecstatic that we'd finally be getting a good guy speaking for the administration, and one who wouldn't let the press shape the agenda. About 5 seconds later, I thought "OH S**T!!"..thinking of all the stuff that had been on the threads, and FR in general, and figuring that every WH presser would begin with questions about what had been posted on FR.
Yet in one of the greatest intelligence operations ever,t he day before the announcement, every mention, post, link to/from Tony Snow had been scrubbed. It vanished..like he was never here. I don't think the MSM ever mentioned it, or asked him about it.
The worst thing is, this will be used to slime other Tea Party candidates in primaries.
Facebook is for idiots. So is twitter. Serious people don’t do this
They do need to be vetted. Coming out and saying you are Tea Party should not be good enough. I think you need a number of years of proving you are Tea Party material. Wolf has nothing. I see so many candidates saying what they will do and then not even trying after getting elected.
But we have genuinely good Tea Party candidates running elsewhere who will be smeared because they are endorsed by the same groups. That on top of the attacks already being used against them, and this could be a disaster year for conservatives. I have already said, if we don’t see major victories of real conservatives in the primaries this year, I will not lift a finger to help the GOP in the general. I’m sick of them all.
You'd think by now people would get it. Online = no privacy and it never goes away.
They were put back on AFTER he left the WH
I don’t know how much this represents a flawed candidate, but I do know how much this represents the immense challenge non-politicians face in unseating establishment politicians in the era of social networks and google caches.
If washington will ever again be the seat of government for and by the people, a certain amount of dirt must be accepted by the general populace because normal people lead somewhat dirty lives. Normal people sometimes have racist family members or friends, think gallows humor ot sexist jokes are funny, might have gotten arrested in the past, missed a mortgage payment here or there.
In this case, as far as I can tell, is an example of inside the trade gallows humor getting outside it’s intended audience. Tasteless, yes. Disqualifying? I dont see it that way. Teachers vent about bratty kids, policemen joke about criminals, soldiers tease each other about war and death. The establishment, both parties of it, know this and seek it out as a fulcrum to pivot opinion away from normal people. Establishment people, or people who aspire to be part of the establishment, think about this all the time and scrub evidence of normality from their lives. All the dirt still happens, but stories are scrubbed, friends are disowned and statements are renounced. If something as innocent as a facebook post can cripple a nascent campaign and potentially ruin a family in the process, normal people will make a reasoned decision that their family is not worth losing and never mount a campaign. This is terrible for the republic.
What should be important is the totality of the character of the candidate, not scandalous things, either real or contrived. Playing in to gotcha politics just guarantees it will continue to be used against outsiders.
Before the LAUNCH. Probably not before he and/or his associates or those encouraging him to run were whispering about the possibility of running for Senate.
In any event, if it was ever there, it still raises questions about his values regardless of the folly of leaving the posts up.
I've never understood why people post their most intimate thoughts and feelings on FB... But I think that saying it's "for idiots" is going a bit far. As with any communication tool, it does have some good uses. For instance, over the last few years, I've been using it in order to keep in touch with family members spread out over the planet while I've been dealing with and recovering from some serious illnesses. It's a lot easier to post how I'm doing on FB than to have to send emails to a bunch of people (yes, I know how "cc" works). It's also been really useful for a family member who works for the State Dept, who was recently stationed in South Sudan. Given the situation there, the whole family was holding our breath until she got out of that hell-hole!
I also really like it, because it's allowed me to "meet" a lot of people in the IBD community, which has really helped me with my emotional recovery.
Twitter, not so much... Real men don't "tweet."
Mark
I guess all that’s up to the conservatives there in that state. It’s up to them now. Regardless, I don’t think it diminishes the discontent that prompted support for this guy. Whether Roberts survives is going to be a question of whether this thing will stick, I guess.
Twitter is 100% public...Facebook is only if you set it to be...unfortunately a lot of people set their posts to “global” and never bother changing the settings to be private / only viewable by other friends. Looks like Wolf had his set to “global” so they were probably google cached even if he deleted them.
Agreed. I am a serious person and I am on FB.
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