There isn’t any other reaction we can imagine after reading O’Donoghue’s absolutely ridiculous bias-inspired piece about prominent GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio being hired by Eddie Rispone’s gubernatorial campaign.
Here’s the lede…
There’s now a link between the Louisiana 2019 governor’s race and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump — sort of. Republican gubernatorial candidate Eddie Rispone has hired Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster for Trump’s 2016 campaign, who reportedly met with federal investigators last year.
Fabrizio has not been accused of any wrongdoing or named as a subject of the probe. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday (Jan. 30) or Wednesday. But like some other former members of the president’s campaign, Fabrizio met with Mueller’s team in early 2018, CNN reported.
Tuesday was the 29th, not the 30th, which is a pretty bad factual error to make in the second graph of a newspaper article. But to pen a story that paints the Rispone campaign as some sort of shady Russian influence operation, or whatever, because of a pollster who got hired, is pretty much the most contemptuous bit of political reporting we can imagine.
It’s not even an accurate smear to say that kind of stuff about the Trump campaign, given that there has never been a shred of evidence of Russian collusion. To throw it out there on Rispone’s campaign for having hired a pollster is the kind of thing we’d expect a respectable journalist never to even think or doing.
And yet here’s Julia doing it.
Fabrizio is closely connected with two people in Trump’s orbit who became targets of the Mueller investigation: Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former advisor Roger Stone.
Manafort’s attorneys revealed earlier this month that Manafort shared polling data with a Russian thought to have intelligence connections. Fabrizio was one of the people who conducted polling for Trump’s campaign, though he has not been asked to appear as a witness at either of Manafort’s trials.
So Fabrizio has nothing to do with any Russians, based on the facts at hand, but because he did polling for Trump’s campaign he’s somehow tainted by Moscow?
Unbelievable.
O’Donoghue can, we guess, defend herself by including a couple of graphs which point to the rest of her story as being absolute, unexpurgated bullshit…
A veteran of several high-profile political campaigns, Fabrizio is considered one of the best in the business of political polling – and he’s familiar with Louisiana. He previously worked for U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy and former Gov. Mike Foster. Other notable clients include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Florida Sen. Rick Scott.
“We hired Tony because he’s one of the best pollsters in the United States,” said Anthony Ramirez, campaign spokesman for Rispone on Tuesday. “His record of winning elections, including the Trump presidential campaign, demonstrates his deep understanding of the conservative electorate.”
But because Fabrizio worked with Manafort on the 1996 Bob Dole campaign, and because he apparently knows and lives nearby to Stone, that makes him suspect according to O’Donoghue.
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We had said a while back that it was a matter of time before the level of slime the Democrat media-political complex in the state was throwing at Ralph Abraham, most recently personified in the ridiculous coordinated smear of Abraham as some sort of welcher on charitable giving, would eventually come to Rispone. And we figured when it came it would come in the Times-Picayune, given that Rispone is from Baton Rouge and well-liked in town, and were it to be the Advocate throwing mud at him it could have a negative result from that paper’s advertisers to an extent.
O’Donoghue didn’t disappoint, did she? Here’s a stupid smear with zero factual value for a voter in this fall’s gubernatorial election, offered purely as a partisan attack.
If the Times-Picayune wants to be seen as anything other than a hack publication attempting to put its thumb on the electoral scales, it would unload O’Donoghue for Wednesday night’s idiocy. We won’t hold our breath for that, though. We saw this coming and we see no reason to believe anybody at the Picayune intends to cover this year’s governor’s race objectively. It’s going to be a nonstop attempt to discredit a pair of honorable men in Ralph Abraham and Eddie Rispone by whatever means, however flimsy, available.
And clearly it’s already started.
Want to prove us wrong? Get rid of O’Donoghue. So long as she’s on the job the Picayune’s political coverage is as illegitimate as Sunday’s Super Bowl.
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