Failed Indiana Senate aspirant Richard Mourdock needs some money, please. Just a few bills, if you can spare them? As it turns out, he has a "few last-minute bills" to pay, and the "liberal media" -- while totally responsible for Mourdock's predicament -- refuses to respond to his invoices, I guess? So he is hitting up the faithful in one more round of fundraising emails. Cameron Joseph of The Hill has the scoop:
"After a bitter, hard-fought campaign, many Republicans all over the country were forced to accept defeat rather than celebrate victory. In our case, we found our campaign caught in the liberal media crosshairs. Never has Indiana seen a more obvious example of media bias by reporters more interested in defeating conservatives than reporting the news," Mourdock Finance Director Ashlee Walls writes in a fundraising plea to supporters.
"We fought back and invested heavily in a last-minute push to combat the slew of false accusations Democrats and the liberal media churned up to distract voters."
Naturally, this is a pretty weird take on how Mourdock went from frontrunner to goat in the Indiana Senate election, improbably propelling the Democratic nominee, Joe Donnelly, to Washington. Mourdock wasn't undone by a "false accusation," he was undone by words that he said out loud at a public, televised debate, that reporters were watching. Those words?
"I struggled with it myself a long time but I came to realize that life is a gift from God, that I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something that God intended to happen."
So, nothing was "churned up." Mourdock, after winning the primary, famously said that "the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else." He personally inflicted his opinion about rape on the voters, and they responded by not electing him. (Ironically, you know what the media did go out and "churn up?" The fact that Mourdock's opponent, Donnelly, wasn't that great on the whole issue of rape, either. Donnelly had the good sense to at least say: "I think rape is a heinous and violent crime in every instance ... The God I believe in and the God I know most Hoosiers believe in, does not intend for rape to happen -- ever. What Mr. Mourdock said is shocking, and it is stunning that he would be so disrespectful to survivors of rape."
Back when Joseph was covering the Indiana Senate debate for The Hill, he noted that "moderate Republicans who backed Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.)" -- the man Mourdock ousted in the GOP primary -- were still "undecided" about backing Mourdock. Flash forward to Election Day, and, Joseph notes, those voters never came home to Mourdock: "He also failed to win over independents and centrist Republicans who had warm feelings" toward Lugar.
Lugar would have beaten Donnelly handily, basically. But every fundraising email needs a villain!
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