There's a hotly contested senate primary still underway in Alaska. The absentee ballots are still coming in, but it looks like Tea Party Express candidate Joe Miller may pull out a squeaker and topple Lisa Murkowski from the senate seat.
The endorsement of Sarah Palin, and more importantly a ballot measure for parental notification for abortion brought the Tea Partiers out in droves. The passion of the right-of-right primary voter appears to have won the day.
The Murkowski camp is reeling. The state is in shock. Will Murkowski run a third party campaign to reclaim her seat? She's not ruling it out, and Miller doesn't like it, because he knows that his chances of a victory crumble if Murkowski is back in the race for the general election.
So how does our potentially new junior senator handle the news? Seems he's been learning at the knee of his mentor, Sarah Palin and has taken to Twitter. Miller linked to the story about Murkowski's potential third-party run and tweeted. What does our new diplomat and master-statesman have to say?
What's the difference between selling out your party's values and the oldest profession?
Keep it Classy, Joe.
Apparetnly, Joe "Tea Party" Miller (who wants to abolish the department of education, and thinks unemployment benefits are unconstitutional) isn't particularly concerned about picking up Murkowski voters in the general election. He must not have been paying attention to Lisa Murkowski's 79% approval rating a few months ago. If you listen really hard, you can hear the stampede as a whole bunch of Republicans decide that Democratic candidate Scott McAdams, the mayor of Sitka just got their vote.
Someone must have "handled" the wannabe nominee pretty quickly because the tweet was deleted, but only after it went out to thousands of followers, and multiple hashtags, and got retweeted multiple times. And the irony that his mentor Palin quit her government job to pursue a lucrative book deal, speaking tour, and hop on the Fox News gravy train did not escape observers.
Backpedaling like a clown on a unicycle, Miller has now issued a statement saying he was talking about the Libertarian Party, not about Senator Murkowski at all. That's not what the tweet said, but apparently he thinks people won't notice. So now in a clumsy attempt to repair the damage, he's not only compared Murkowski to a whore, but the entire Libertarian Party. Of course, the Koch Brothers who are the huge funding source behind the Tea Party which endorsed Miller and got him the cash to win his nomination are... wait for it... Libertarians..
He also conveniently blames "a staffer" who he says was trying to encourage the libertarian party not to sell out. But it seems obvious that Miller pens at least some of his own tweets.
As the train wreck continues, national attention is focusing on Democratic candidate Scott McAdams who until recently was considered a dark horse, and now stands within reach of the senate seat. Little was known about McAdams outside the Alaskan panhandle, but the former commercial fisherman, school board president, and mayor of Sitka is now showing himself to be all the things that Sarah Palin claimed to be, only he's the "real deal."
This home-grown common sense 'Papa Grizzly' stands to go head to head with Miller, an ivy league attorney who was born and raised in Kansas, and apparently has "diplomacy challenged" tendencies. Where Alaskans go from here will make this contest one of the most interesting to watch in November. Get ready for the future adventures of 'Joe the Candidate.' Never a dull moment on the Last Frontier.
UPDATE:
Murkowski's campaign manager (and former Palin Legislative Director) John Bitney, said to Sean Cockerham at the Anchorage Daily News:
He just basically called Senator Murkowski a prostitute," Bitney said. "I am doing my best in a moment of extreme anger right at the moment to be measured in my remarks. The word that comes to mind is deplorable. Disgusting. The man has no place representing Alaska in the U.S. Senate with that kind of attitude
Miller has apologized, but blames the gaffe on a staffer who he says was trying to encourage the Libertarian Party not to sell out. Nice try.
The story has now been picked up by the Associated Press, and has gone viral nationally.