…over its attack on Eddie Rispone which launched today. The ad Gumbo PAC put out is built on the theory that Rispone is a bad boss who does bad things, and it’s precisely why businesspeople don’t generally get into politics.

Here’s the ad…

https://host2.advertisinganalyticsllc.com/admo/#/viewer/a01fda36-3c99-4a5b-8039-3e4695e46034/

The transcript of the ad says the following:

These are real Louisiana crawfish. These are from China. They look alike, but we know the difference. This is Governor candidate Eddie Rispone. He says he’ll look out for Louisiana workers, but as a businessman Rispone he’s repeatedly failed to pay his employees and refused to pay their medical bills. And Rispone got caught trying to hire foreign workers instead of people here in Louisiana. Phony Eddie Rispone. He’s not for you Paid for and authorized by Gumbo PAC.

Rispone’s campaign told us their attorney is firing off a letter today demanding the ads be taken down. It’ll likely take a little time to figure out whether any or all of the ad is true, and we’ll update when we get to the bottom of it, but a couple of things are obvious.

First, Gumbo PAC is, as an organization, everything that is wrong with the state of Louisiana. It was Gumbo PAC who spent $3 million four years ago inundating the people of Louisiana with TV ads about hookers, and after the result they produced close to 100,000 more people will have left the state than have moved in, amid $7 billion in tax increases and a state economy which has shrunk two years out of the last three. Louisiana, even after that mass net outmigration, has one of the highest unemployment rates in America.

Gumbo PAC is responsible to a large extent for the state Louisiana finds itself in at present, and now they’re going to slime somebody else who’s attempting to make it better.

One day, hopefully soon, someone will start saying things about Trey Ourso, the Democrat political consultant who runs Gumbo PAC, along the same lines of what Ourso says about people a lot better than him.

Does Eddie Rispone not pay his employees? Put it this way – ISC Constructors currently has some 3,000 employees and probably tens of thousands of former employees given the nature of the construction business. Is it inevitable that pay disputes might arise amid so many transactional relationships? Of course.

And then there is the insinuation, without directly making the allegation, that Eddie Rispone hires illegal aliens to work on construction sites. This one is an especially sleazy piece of politics, because people know that the construction industry is one where there are a lot of illegal aliens working jobs. And even using e-Verify, you might unknowingly hire one here and there. But while they’re making the insinuation by using “foreign workers” as their verbiage, that’s not even what Gumbo PAC is alleging here. What they’re bringing up is H1-B visas – in other words legal immigrants. There is apparently something wrong with trying to hire legal immigrants on construction sites now, according to these people, though all this is is a stair-step to making the casual viewer of the ad think “illegals.”

Of the 30,000+ employees in the history of ISC, three had H1-B visas. Three. Two already had the visas at the time of hiring and were already in the United States. The third was an ISC student intern at LSU that upon graduation applied for the lottery to obtain full time employment.

This is what Gumbo PAC is saying amounts to gaming the system to screw Louisiana workers – at a time when John Bel Edwards, the trial lawyer Gumbo PAC helped to install in the governor’s mansion, has run off almost 100,000 more Louisianans than have moved into the state and is sitting on the highest unemployment in the South. They’re making things up to accuse Eddie Rispone of being bad for the working man in Louisiana when their effect on the working man is to put him out of work.

Diabolical.

Four years ago the trial lawyers who make up the bulk of Gumbo PAC’s funders attacked David Vitter over hookers, when many, if not most, of them are paying alimony to their first wives who they’ve cheated on and left. They didn’t attack Vitter on the real quibble they had with him, which was that Vitter was an aggressive proponent of tort reform to do something about Louisiana’s abysmal legal climate and sky-high car insurance rates. They didn’t dare do that because they knew had they done so, most of the public would have been on Vitter’s side and not theirs.

That’s exactly what this is about as well. Rispone, like Vitter, is a tort reform advocate. So instead of engaging that debate, they slime him with trumped-up garbage about pay disputes and illegals on the job.

And they call Rispone a phony. Talk about the Gumbo PAC pot calling the kettle black.