Katherine Harris update

A few days ago, I posted this article wondering what prompts a person to spend everything they have on a Senate race, when the best possible outcome for them would be to win and then earn a salary which would require them to hold the seat for something like 70 years to earn back the money spent.

Well, it turns out Ms. Harris was not being entirely up front with us. While she was playing drama queen and emotionally telling the Fox News audience that she was putting "everything I have" on the line, and Sean Hannity was playing her up to be some kind of conservative hero for taking one for the team, the fact is that the $10 million she's putting "on the line" consists solely of the money left to her by her father, not the millions of additional dollars she already had before her father passed away. She's played some tricks, like putting some of the assets into her husbands name, but the fact is that she's NOT, as she's trying to claim, putting "everything" on the line. She's just another rich person trying to by an election, and trying to spin it in such a way that she'll resonate with the poor people.

Oh, and it gets better. Because she's currently polling at about 2/3s the number of votes her main competitor gets, she makes herself out to be this tragic figure, putting all this money on the line and won't you all please vote for her, because otherwise she'll have risked it all in vain? But in fact, she is saying she's going to save this particular $10 million for a late-in-the-game media blitz. Which means that if by the end of the campaign she's so far behind she realizes she can't win, she just changes her mind and keeps her money. If she's so far ahead that she doesn't NEED the media blitz, then she decides not to spend it and keeps the money.

In reality, the only way in which she ends up spending the money is if she's pulled herself to the point that it's a reasonably close race and the extra media time has a really good chance of making the difference... after which she still has more money remaining than most citizens of this counry will earn in their entire lives.

Just a big old stinking pile of BS, wrapped in the guise of a poor tragic woman putting it all on the line for her beliefs.

I guess with the culture of lies that is the hallmark of the current Administration and a significant fraction of the upper levels of the Republican party today, I shouldn't be surprised.

Liam.