Akron Beacon Journal tells candidate to earn an endorsement they say he's unfit for
In April the local paper was one of many to call JD Vance undeserving of the GOP nomination and bid to the US Senate. . . now they want him to come in and have a chat.
I have for some time been among the crowd that says no matter who is elected to our federal elected offices there is a permanent class of unelected, unaccountable appointees and civil service hires who are a law unto themselves. Therefore the coming midterm elections are in my mind not the mechanism by which the US can be turned back from ruin. We may have to hit rock bottom economically in order for Americans to be rid of the political and bureaucratic classes. Nonetheless I have voted in this year’s primaries and intend to vote in the general election.
In May Ohio went to the primary polls and chose for its open US Senate seat Democrat Rep. Tim Ryan and Republican JD Vance . Much of the attention and polling numbers in the primary election shifted to Vance once he won the endorsement of former Pres. Donald Trump. Ahead of the vote the Akron Beacon-Journal issued an editorial endorsement of Vance’s opponent Ohio State Senator Matt Dolan who ran on the position of being the only GOP candidate not seeking Trump’s endorsement. But the headline of their article was more a dis-endorsement of Vance than an endorsement of Dolan. They even closed the article by calling for blatant primary tampering: “Independents and even some Democrats may find it wise to request a Republican ballot May 3 and vote for DeWine and Dolan.” Thanks in part to this clarion call by the media for non-Republicans to vote in the GOP primary Dolan was able to surge to a third place finish behind Josh Mandel.
The Beacon Journal was not alone as other newspapers across the state never hid their disdain for Vance:
The Cincinatti Enquirer’s Jason Williams predicted that Vance would earn third place in the primary as a “best-case scenario” and ridiculed the race as a “Battle of the Phonies” in April when it became clear that Vance and Josh Mandel were the leading candidates. He also made sure to praise Dolan for taking the “Sane Lane” in the primary by eschewing Trump.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer endorsed Dolan on April 9 by contrasting him with all of the other candidates that it lumped together for seeking Trump’s endorsement.
One of the reasons that Vance was attacked so directly was his change of tune from condemning Trump in 2016 to effectively adopting much of his platform today. That is a fair criticism, but it isn’t a disqualifying factor. If it were, then Tim Ryan would be disqualified too. In September 2019 he told a reporter on the phone “I just think Biden is declining. . . I don’t think he has the energy. You see it almost daily. And I love the guy.” At the time Ryan was running a failing presidential campaign that ended up between those of Bill de Blasio and Beto O’Rourke - nowhere. Two months later he endorsed Declinin’ Biden without much of an explanation, and he doesn’t talk about his energy or any other declining attribute anymore. This is a shame since even leftists and liberals are acknowledging reality now. Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic recently wrote an article titled “Where do the Democrats find these guys?” where she marveled that Biden had announced his first presidential campaign a few weeks before her first wedding. She dissects in hilarious detail how not only did Biden plagiarize a speech during that campaign from British politician Neil Kinnock, but he even couldn’t tell a straight story of how he did it, nor who inserted Kinnock’s text into his speech. Her final question was “Have you ever had to take the keys away from an old relative? It’s not easy. Sometimes you give up the fight to keep the peace. And then you hope against hope that everything will be all right.”
This is a liberal mainstream writer basically summing up what people know about the president: That he’s so past his prime and memory addled that he can’t even keep his own lies straight. The Beacon Journal doesn’t take Tim Ryan to task for how he acknowledged to a reporter what he knew about Biden and then endorsed him anyway. Bear in mind that he had several other options in November 2019, including some that are now serving in the Biden Administration. Whatever else one can say about Pete Buttigieg and his illiterate perspective on auto consumers, he doesn’t have dementia. Nowadays when Biden visits Ohio during campaign season Tim Ryan is mysteriously too busy to join him at his events. Ryan got his feet wet in politics as an aide to a corrupt politician, his predecessor Rep. Jim Traficant who was convicted in 2002 on charges of bribery and racketeering.
Show us you’re not unfit
One of the most cowardly aspects of an editorial board review is that no single person has answer for it. The latest Beacon Journal article repeats the assertion that he is unfit while defending President Biden against Vance’s attacks on inflation. It cites “various Republicans” that criticized Vance for “not reaching out to Ohioans”, and one of Ryan’s attacks against his nonprofit Our Ohio Renewal.
It’s not as if this is a new game. Before becoming active politically Vance was being heralded by the Guardian as the literary voice of poor rural white Americans due to his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But that treatment changed once he dipped his toe in. In May following Vance’s primary win I wrote about a Politico hit piece that attempted to cast doubt on his being an authentic hillbilly because supposedly he was born in Middletown, Ohio which in technical terms is outside of Appalachia. The article cited author Silas House, a far left professor of “Appalachian Studies” from Kentucky, who had a long standing animus toward Vance and indeed to his own hill country neighbours for their homophobia.
In November the voters will decide whether Vance or Ryan is fit to be a US senator. The Akron Beacon Journal and most Ohio papers of record have already revealed their prejudice against one of them and shouldn’t expect him to cater to their standards.
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