He's Baaaaack!

Lew has recovered from licking his wounds and the Clark County Conservative Establishment website is once again public.  Lew is apparently unwilling to harbor the slightest hint of dissension, as his comments are set to fully moderated.and if you think you'll get past his filter unless you're agreeing with him 100%, think again.

For the record, we at the watch chose to dial back the rhetoric, since Lew had been reduced to repeating himself ad nauseum and it was clear he was stubbornly refusing to offer anything coherent to move the conversation forward.  It was our sincere hope that Lew would return a kinder, gentler blogger, more interested in getting his facts straight and being objective than he was in pounding his own drum and trying to sling mud at perceived opponents who actually share most of his values.  It would have made him a better journalist and would have served the community better.

Alas, you can't teach the old dog new tricks, and Lew persists in his mindless attacks.  His mind is made up, dammit, don't confuse him with facts.  The troll is back and continues his trolling.

Lew continues his journey into paranoid irrelevance with  a missive entitled "Prosper and Thrive?"  It starts out with a whine about being subjected to a smear campaign because he exposed "underhanded tactics" by the CCGOP. 

Did anyone here at LWW call Lew a shit-smearer?  No, that was what Lew called Frank Decker in a comment thread.  Did anyone here at LWW call Lew an asshole?  No, that was his epithet of choice that he flung at just about anyone in sight who dared to challenge his speculative grip on facts. No, we here at LWW watch just publicly ridiculed him for outright lying, selective outrage and presenting his biased, ignorant opinions as facts. To quote "Mr Dubois" from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, we were merely ". . .heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice [we] shall always follow."  If Mr. Waters doesn't want to be the butt of satire and be made to look ridiculous, perhaps he should refrain from saying ridiculous things.


Lew didn't "expose" anything.  He manufactured a scandal and then rode it for all it's worth.  Lew has yet to demonstrate what bylaws were broken, what ethical code was challenged, what law was violated by politically active people recruiting like-minded citizens to step into the political arena and have their voices heard.  Does Lew think he has a smoking gun in the form of an e-mail that encouraged PCO candidates to discuss the race with their opponents (who are also their neighbors, and probably well known to them) to see if they were amenable to dropping out?  That such an e-mail was in dubious good taste is undisputed, but "underhanded?"  No lies were spread about anyone.  No one was subjected to any sort of coercion.  And in the long run this had exactly zero effect on any PCO races.  Not a single candidate withdrew after that e-mail had been sent as a result of being approached by their opponent.  Of those that did withdraw, many did so because their names were submitted as candidates without their knowledge or approval by Apollo Fuhriman, an operative for the WSRP.  Since we here at LWW aren't at the inside of the investigation of this scandal, we won't comment on what involvement that local establishment-oriented Republicans may have had, but we understand that there is some damning evidence to implicate at least two local people in this.  These facts suggest that there is far more to the story than Lew would like you to believe, but he ignores it because it's suggestive that his "scoop" was premature, and that he's not half the journalist he would like you to believe.

Of course the Columbian smelled blood in the water for Republicans and broke the story in their bird cage lining, citing Lew. It should bother a good conservative when the local mouthpiece for the Democrat party is salivating at your story. 

Then Lew goes on to label the local GOP leadership as "hotheads" and makes the rash and completely unsupportable charge that David Madore bankrolled the move to return the local GOP to the people.  He uses the rhetoric that "It is well known. . . " to open this charge, when it's nothing of the sort, but pure speculation on the part of one L. Waters, who is a respected blogger in Clark County, and if you don't know what he "knows," well that's why he's the Clark County Conservative and you're just an ignorant reader.

No, Lew, Mr. Madore has no clue who is behind LWW. I suggest you be sure of your target before you start making allegations.

The rest of this article of mostly tripe is a rambling collection of anecdotal "evidence" that tries to simultaneously show that there is a problem with a contract between Trimet and C-Tran and that Mr. Madore is doing something questionable without actually making the charge directly. Lew does some mumbling about feeling out of the loop because Mr. Madore chose not to elaborate with him about the latest details of the twice-dead but never gone CRC project, or about some media venture that Lew apparently had high hopes for.  It never occurs to Lew that perhaps his recent public and foul-mouthed melt-down because someone had the audacity to publicly correct him might have something to do with the fact that very few people want to be associated with him.

Near the end, he sympathizes with the 99%, observing that David Madore is rich and Lew is still poor.  News for you, Lew: Clark County is prospering.  You were invited to participate, but you apparently declined. 

Reposting about Paulbots

Lew gave us a June present by dusting off an old article he wrote in 2008.  This article is substantially correct, but is a classic case of editorialization being disguised as journalism.  We're going to take this apart and point out a few logical disconnects.

The article opens up with the assertion that Michael Delavar lost to Brian Baird by the largest margin in 20 years.  Yeah, Lew, that sort of thing happens when your party refuses to endorse or support you.  Whose fault is that?

Then he makes an innuendo about David Madore inadvertently using a video that Lew had produced that highlighted Tim Leavitt's absurdity. Newsflash, Lew: once you put something on the internet, it's out there, and may pop up just about anywhere.  If you wanted credit, you should have run a banner in the corner of the video. It's not incumbent on anyone to track down the source of everything they find on the internet just so they don't ruffle the feathers of an already overly ruffled old man. Madore, upon discovering that Lew had produced the video, apologized, but in the current state of Lew's high paranoia, that ain't good enough.

The article then delves into a flashback to 2008, and opens with the assertion that somehow Ron Paul Libertarians have "snuck" [sic] into the party as PCO's.  How does one "sneak" into a party as a PCO?  I must have missed the interview to make sure I was ideologically pure enough to be a Republican. I'm sure that in his dreams as King of the Clark County Republican Party, Lew will enact litmus tests and appoint himself as the filter for making sure that only people who agree with his political biases get to join the county government.

Lew goes on to make a brief but entirely correct criticism of Ron Paul's unrealistic and quite dangerous foreign policy.  This is appropriate, as many have discounted Dr. Paul for this very reason, and rightly so.

Then he stated that Michael Delavar did not receive the party endorsement before the primary.  WHAT THE HELL? That, right there, is the heart of what many local Republicans, whether they supported Paul or someone else, see as the problem with the Republican party.  The party should NOT be in the business of supporting one candidate over another before the primary.  The very idea that they would is so antithetical to the idea of a grass-roots organization that it leaves me spluttering.  This sort of thinking is why that idiot squish Rob McKenna was nominated in 2013 to lose to Inslee, instead of running a much better candidate like Shahram Hadian. McKenna had the party's endorsement going into the primary, I guess because it was "his turn."  And people like Lew can't understand why the rank and file conservative citizens are rising up against the establishment?

Lew closed out the article with general imprecations about Ron Paul supporters, and how they weren't Republican.  I can understand Lew's position.  I've encountered the same sort of Ron Paul arguments, the slavish devotion to poorly understood principles, and the chanting that they do without apparently considering realistic consequences of the actions they propose.  Lew's reaction is to knock them on their asses, and since he can't do that, he dismissed them as some sort of religious cult.  The fact is that we are in a marketplace of ideas, and once you get the RP supporters to quit chanting and start justifying their more ridiculous policy positions, they become quite easy to disarm.  To do so you must have facts at hand and reasonable debating skills, and not allow them to start chanting again. 

The sad thing is that Lew lacks discernment.  Just because Ron Paul's foreign policy ideas come from Never-Never Land does not mean that everything he says is to be disregarded.  On domestic issues, Ron Paul Libertarians are spot-on - the government MUST live within its means, spending MUST be controlled, and the Keynesian nonsense the Federal Reserve is practicing MUST be halted. The Constitution must be observed, and as the servants of the people, legislators are obligated to vote against any legislation that is not specifically allowed under the constitution.  These are core principles of libertarians, and should be congruent with the values of anyone else who calls himself a conservative.  These values are pertinent to Clark County - the foreign policy fantasies Ron Paul are not.  Lew needs to understand this, and realize that there is no local issue that he's not likely to find agreement with the Ron Paul supporters on. 

What we've got here. . .