Typical. Seems the "story" that the governor of Maryland, Bob Ehrlich, and his conservative African-American lieutenant governor have been peddling is all lies.
They've been claiming for years that the lt gov was pelted with Oreo cookies at a debate - because an "Oreo" is a word used to describe a black person who is black on the outside and white on the inside, i.e., a sell-out. Well, now there's overwhelming evidence that the incident never happened, even though the governor and his staff have been quite detailed in their descriptions of exactly how it did happen.
So now we have the governor refusing to answer questions at all:
Speaking on Stateline with the Governor on WBAL-AM yesterday, Ehrlich said he would not tolerate questions about the veracity of the incident.Yet his spokesman recalls a veritable shower of Oreos:
"This revisionism is real dangerous. And to the extent anyone is out there now saying, 'Well, no, those Oreo cookies really weren't thrown at Mike Steele, that's now an urban legend, whatever, made up by the Republicans,' I mean these people have got to get real," Ehrlich said....
As for those who question the story, Ehrlich said yesterday: "They're not going to be able now to reinvent something that a lot of people saw. Just go ask people who were there."
Paul Schurick, Ehrlich's communications director, said last week that he saw people passing out packages of the cookies outside Morgan State University's fine arts center before the debate and that when Steele entered the auditorium about 15 minutes before the start, people let fly with the cookies.Wow, locusts. That must have caused quite a mess:
"It was raining Oreos," Schurick said. "They were thick in the air like locusts. I was there. It was very real. It wasn't subtle.
Several debate attendees, however, could not corroborate Ehrlich and Schurick's version of events.Funny, because the shower of locusts apparently even hit people, they said:
"It didn't happen here," said Vander Harris, operations manager of the Murphy Fine Arts Building at Morgan State. "I was in on the cleanup, and we found no cookies or anything else abnormal. There were no Oreo cookies thrown."...
Clint Coleman, a spokesman for Morgan State who was at the event, said he saw lots of unseemly behavior but no Oreos.
"There were a lot of things, disturbances, by this group of outsiders who were bent on disrupting the debate," Coleman said. "But I never actually saw Oreo cookies being thrown at him."
As for "raining Oreos," Coleman said, "I can tell you that did not happen."
Neil Duke, who moderated the event for the NAACP, said last week that he didn't see any cookies....
Most of the accounts in the past few weeks have described Steele being "pelted" by Oreos. Ehrlich said on WBAL radio that his father was hit in the head by one of the cookies. Schurick also said Ehrlich's father was hit. Schurick would not make Robert L. Ehrlich Sr. available for an interview yesterday.Yes, now that the story has been debunked, now that it's been shown with proof that Steele and Ehrlich have lied about this story for 3 years, everyone is shutting up:
Steele campaign spokesman Leonardo Alcivar said last week that the cookies "were clearly thrown at the lieutenant governor." He said Steele would not respond to questions about the event.You know, if Steele and Ehrlich want to use race to their advantage, and oh they do, then they need to address racial issues even when the issue at hand is their own race-baiting.
They can't have their Oreo and eat it too.
