Wrong Again

If you listened to this week’s Conservative Refuge Radio, you heard me discuss last week’s attempt by Center Maryland’s Josh Kurtz to portray some alternative reality view of the Maryland Republican Party. It isn’t the first time that Mr. Kurtz has opined about the present and future of the Maryland GOP. Just like his previous efforts to define the “rising stars” of the MDGOP he gets it so very wrong.

In his latest, Mr. Kurtz argues that the true leader of the Maryland Republican Party is our newly elected national committeeman David Bossie. We here at Red Maryland have enormous respect for Mr. Bossie’s contributions and are quite impressed and excited about what he will bring to the state’s GOP leadership. If you listened to his interview with us on Red Maryland Radio you will no doubt agree. But Kurtz gives David Bossie an almost mythic importance that I am sure even he would eschew as pure hyperbole. Kurtz writes:

Forget Donald Trump or U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). There may be no one more responsible for creating the current state of the U.S. political system than David Bossie.

Really?

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While Mr. Bossie’s work with Citizens United and their fight for free speech culminating in the Citizens United v. FEC case is important and noteworthy, only in the liberal mind does this alone explain or cause the current political environment. Kurtz’s overstatement of the impact of Citizens United  betrays his liberal worldview which warps the Supreme Court’s simple decision that the First Amendment protects political speech from regulation into some conservative corporatist conspiracy to thwart “true progress”.  Such a view is proven by this statement:

Bossie’s handiwork is everywhere: On the airwaves thick with political advertising. In the preponderance of shadowy groups with neutral names and unclear funding streams, pushing controversial agendas. Even here at the Republican National Convention, where — just like at next week’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia — every event seems to have a surfeit of corporate sponsors.

Kurtz then transmutes this grandiose pronouncement of Bossie’s impact on national politics into a claim that David Bossie is the savior and driving force behind the MDGOP’s recent successes. He makes the absurd claim that:

Asked what’s next on his agenda after shaking up the nation’s campaign finance system and a moribund Maryland GOP, Bossie smiled. “You mean, is there a coup de grace or something? No.”

“shaking up a moribund Maryland GOP?” Did I miss a memo somewhere? With all of Mr. Bossie’s accomplishments and efforts I seem to recall it was other leaders in our state, led by Governor Hogan, who turned around the state party’s fortunes over the last couple of years and no one would list David Bossie’s name prominently among them.

Here, though, is the biggest flat out untruth belying Kurtz’s piece. After trodding out again the cheap journalism of Hogan’s split with Maryland Republicans, he makes the claim of the MDGOP that “it’s not really Gov. Larry Hogan’s party”. Kurtz then doubles down on this delusion by claiming that Governor Hogan “has yet to seize control of the state GOP or attempt to build it”.

What nonsense.

Yes, Governor Hogan has not interfered directly in the election of state party officers who, with the exception of Bossie, have remained the same since before his election. That Hogan has not sought to install new leaders in the MDGOP is commendable, not a sign of a lack of leadership especially since, to a person, every single member of the MDGOP leadership and staff have enthusiastically supported the Governor and closely coordinated with his campaign in the past.

In order to believe that Governor Hogan “has yet to attempt to build the state GOP”, though,  you would have to ignore the dozens of campaigns and candidates the Governor worked with in 2014, the scores of fundraisers for both the party itself and GOP candidates that the Governor has headlined over the past couple of years and the plethora of Lincoln Day Dinners and party functions which he has attended and addressed.

It would also require sufficient cranial-anal insertion to ignore Governor Hogan’s public endorsement of the Maryland’s Republican candidate for the United States Senate, Kathy Szeliga, that was occurring literally as Josh Kurtz was writing that Governor Hogan has yet to attempt the build the Maryland Republican Party.

The facts are pretty compelling that no one person has done more to build the MDGOP over the last few years than Larry Hogan something, I expect, David Bossie would readily acknowledge.

Let us be clear.  Josh Kurtz and Center Maryland don’t have the slightest idea what they are talking about when they write about the Maryland GOP. Their audience is liberal Maryland democrats who do not understand their opposition and, it would appear, wish to remain blissfully ignorant preferring instead some fever dream bearing no relationship to the real world.