Remember Jeffrey Frederick during the presidential campaign? He's the elected official (State Delegate) from Virginia and Chair of the Virginia Republican Party who wanted his party activists to link Obama to bin Laden:
With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary." It is also not exactly true — though that distorted reference to Obama's controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. "And he won't salute the flag," one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, "We don't even know where Senator Obama was really born." Actually, we do; it's Hawaii.Classy crowd, those Republicans. Nothing like inciting hate on the campaign trail.
This year, there's a governor's race in Virginia and the GOP desperately wants that office back after eight years. That party was shocked when Obama carried the state. And, the demographics of this once solidly red state have been changing dramatically.
So, the Republicans are trying to clean up their image. Yesterday, Delegate Frederick got dumped as Chair of the GOP in Virginia:
Virginia Republicans ousted embattled party chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick on Saturday at a tense meeting that left the party bitterly divided as it heads into a crucial campaign season.If incompetence and mismanagement was really a standard, the GOP would have dumped George Bush and most of the congressional leaders long ago.
Frederick's dismissal came after he repeatedly resisted public requests for his resignation from almost every top-ranking Republican officeholder in Virginia. They accused him of incompetence and mismanagement.
Virginia Republicans are waging this intra-party war solely to clean up the party image. It's actually more like a whitewash. They still have the same bad policies and Jeffrey Frederick said what most Republicans think, but don't say out loud except to each other.
The hard-core activists aren't happy:
Dozens of Frederick's supporters rallied outside a hotel west of Richmond where the committee was meeting, waving signs that said "Don't Split My Party" and "We Elected Jeff. We Want Him to Stay" and chanting "Elected, Not Selected." Frederick stood on the sidelines, watching and praying with a small group of supporters.
"It's nothing but a mob lynching. That's what it is,'' said Theresa Robinson, a Republican activist from Chester.
