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Tea Party Leader Allen West’s Advice for Baker-Polito: Make Campaign About West vs. Obama

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[Cross-posted from the ProgressMass blog.  Like ProgressMass on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.]

When Republican Karyn Polito was announced as Republican Charlie Baker’s 2014 running mate, after numerous other choices reportedly were considered, one of the critiques immediately raised about her selection was her closeness with the right-wing Tea Party.  Among the instances pointed to was her praise for extremist Tea Party leader and Republican former Congressman Allen West:

Since leaving public office after the 2010 defeat, Polito has also worked to promote her ties with the GOP’s conservative right.

In August, a local Tea Party group promoted her Stoughton appearance at a fund-raiser with conservative standard-bearer and former Florida congressman Allen West. In accepting a special award, she praised the former US House member, a Tea Party hero, and took a swipe at the national Republican establishment.

“The Republican National Committee has no message. Colonel West has a good message,” Polito was quoted as saying on the Stoughton Patch website. “We are citizen patriots together. We need to get our country and our Commonwealth back.”

This past Thursday, appearing as a guest on Boston Herald Radio’s Trending Now program was none other than extremist Tea Party leader and Republican former Congressman Allen West.  He was asked about the criticism Republican Karyn Polito received for praising him and appearing with him at an event.  West responded with very simple advice for Polito and for the Republican Baker-Polito ticket (starting at the 1:15:47 mark):

I think Karyn should go on the offense and say, y’know, if you would prefer to be with someone like President Obama, absolutely right.   I will stand with Colonel West any day because of the honor, integrity, the character that I try to portray and the service, the sacrifice that I have given to this country, as opposed to the person I guess they believe in.

Extremist Tea Party leader Allen West is advising that Baker-Polito make the 2014 gubernatorial campaign about whether the voters of Massachusetts prefer to stand with the politics of President Barack Obama or the politics of Allen West.  Indeed, as quoted above, Republican Karyn Polito has declared that West “has a good message.”

Will Baker-Polito, then, invite former Congressman West to campaign with them in Massachusetts?  Will Baker-Polito make the gubernatorial campaign a proxy battle about Obama versus West?  Democrats would probably welcome that.  After all, President Obama won Massachusetts in 2008 with 62% to Republican Arizona Senator John McCain’s 36%; and, he again won Massachusetts in 2012 with a nearly identical 61% to Republican former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s 38%.

Meanwhile, what has former Congressman West said that has earned him the “extremist” designation?  West offered up numerous offensive and embarrassing moments during his brief two-year tenure in Congress.  Among the highlights:

As an Army lieutenant colonel, former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) was relieved of his command, fined $5,000 and eventually allowed to retire in order to avoid court martial for allegedly abusing a prisoner in Iraq. Upon entering Congress, West emerged as one of the body’s top Islamophobes. He also compared food stamps and Social Security to slavery, opposed early voting as an “entitlement,” claimed 80 House Democrats were “members of the Communist Party,” and called Obama supporters a “threat to the gene pool.”

That is who “passed the torch” to Karyn Polito and who is advising the Baker-Polito campaign on Boston Herald Radio.  Democrats no doubt eagerly await an upcoming Allen West-Karyn Polito-Charlie Baker campaign event in Massachusetts in the near future.

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Comments

  1. Certainly among Democratic activists and center-left folk who follow the news, there is a sharp dislike of the Tea Party and anyone who elects to be associated with it. It’s unlikely that the voters that need convincing in the upcoming gubernatorial race would be so unforgiving about Ms. Polito’s association with Mr. West. Wouldn’t they be more inclined to regard this an obscure gotcha of the sort politics is all too full — at least too full from their point of view?

    Suggestion: things having move bearing on how Massachusetts is run are likely to have more impact.

  2. …make this campaign about whether the voters of MA prefer West or Obama and then vote for their respective parties! If that’s the GOP strategy they will look back fondly at the time they had four Senate seats and a handful of House seats and Dems may actually beat the record set by the Know-Nothings in 1854 for nearly monopolizing state government.

  3. This piece skips rather lightly across Mr. West’s “alleged” prisoner abuser.

    I thought I’d share a bit more detail about this 2003 event (emphasis mine):

    Intent on foiling a reported plot to ambush him and his men, Colonel West, a battalion commander, made a calculated decision to intimidate the Iraqi officer with a show of force. An interrogation under way was going nowhere, Colonel West said in an interview, and he chose to take the matter into his own hands.

    ”This could get ugly,” he told his soldiers. But, he said, he imposed limits: ”This man will not be injured and he will not have to be repaired. There will be no blood and no breakage of bones.”

    Still, Colonel West wanted the Iraqi policeman, Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi, to think ”this was going to be the end” if he did not divulge what he knew. So Colonel West presided over what he considered a time-sensitive interrogation that grew steadily more abusive until he himself fired a pistol beside Mr. Hamoodi’s head.

    […]

    Mr. Hamoodi said he felt relieved to hear the colonel was expected. He considered Colonel West to be ”calm, quiet, clever and sociable.” When the colonel first entered the interrogation room, Mr. Hamoodi said, he thought, ”Here is the man who will treat me fairly.”

    Then, he said, Colonel West cocked his gun.

    Colonel West said that he did not then put a round in the gun’s chamber but that he did place the pistol in his lap. He asked Mr. Hamoodi why he wanted to kill him. Mr. Hamoodi said that he protested, ”I’ve worked with you, I like you,” but that Colonel West silenced his protest. Colonel West pressed for the names and locations of those involved in the supposed plot, and he got no answers.

    Soon, the soldiers began striking and shoving Mr. Hamoodi. They were not instructed to do so by Colonel West but they were not stopped, either, they said. ”I didn’t know it was wrong to hit a detainee,” a 20-year-old soldier from Daytona Beach said at the hearing. Colonel West testified that he would have stopped the beating ”had it become too excessive.”

    Eventually, the colonel and his soldiers moved Mr. Hamoodi outside, and threatened him with death. Colonel West said he fired a warning shot in the air and began counting down from five. He asked his soldiers to put Mr. Hamoodi’s head in a sand-filled barrel usually used for clearing weapons. At the end of his count, Colonel West fired a shot into the barrel, angling his gun away from the Iraqi’s head, he testified.

    This scumbag forced a prisoner to “put [his] head in a sand-filled barrel usually used for clearing weapons” and then “fired a shot into the barrel”! We declared that behavior like this was a “crime against humanity” immediately after WWII. Mr. West is a war criminal and should have been prosecuted as such.

    The Massachusetts GOP puts forward candidates who embrace scum like Mr. West — and then bemoans their status as an endangered species.

  4. I mean, he must have known. What is the strategy here?
    from the Globe:
    Charlie Baker, the leading Republican candidate for governor, named former state representative Karyn Polito as his running mate on Tuesday, calling her a public servant in the mold of “one of both of our mentors – the late, great Paul Cellucci.”

    Paul Cellucci?

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