{"id":20170,"date":"2017-11-11T22:47:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T05:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=20170"},"modified":"2017-11-12T11:09:14","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T18:09:14","slug":"prairie-lights-pushed-into-a-corner-politicians-deflect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/11\/prairie-lights-pushed-into-a-corner-politicians-deflect\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: Pushed into a corner, politicians deflect"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Trumps\"<\/a>

Last week, Troy Downing, second from left, tweeted a photo of him, his wife and his daughter with Eric and Donald Trump Jr., who supposedly were in Montana to hunt. No word on whether the Trump brothers now consider themselves Montana residents.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m still trying to decide who had the worst response to last week\u2019s political scandals \u2014 Roy Moore down in Alabama or Troy Downing here in Montana.<\/p>\n

Moore is the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai and presented them to the chosen people of Montgomery, Ala.<\/p>\n

\"Ed\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n

Last week, the Washington Post published a long story detailing alleged improper relations between Moore and several teenage girls.<\/p>\n

At least one of the relationships would have been a crime because at the time the girl was 14 and Moore was 32 \u2014 and he was an assistant district attorney who should have been familiar with the concept of \u201csexual abuse in the second degree,\u201d as defined<\/a> in Alabama law.<\/p>\n

In response to the allegations, Moore\u2019s campaign chairman played the Trump card, calling<\/a> the Washington Post story \u201cthe very definition of fake news.\u201d Moore himself, in a Trump-like Twitter storm<\/a>, cast himself as a Christian martyr being persecuted by godless liberals and other agents of Satan.<\/p>\n

Some of his supporters went completely off the rails, defending Moore on the grounds<\/a> that when the parents of Jesus got hitched, \u201cMary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same witless defender, Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler, also pointed out that the father of John the Baptist was an old geezer when he took himself a young wife.<\/p>\n

Do I need to add anything? Is there any way to mock this kind of stuff that is more compelling than the way such comments mock themselves?<\/p>\n

Anyway, I found one statement from Moore\u2019s campaign even more telling: \u201cAfter over 40 years of public service, if any of these allegations were true, they would have been made public long before now.\u201d<\/p>\n

This kind of explanation, this appeal to logic, is often used by guilty parties who have no other defense. It is the kind of deflection a defense attorney might engage in, not the response of someone who knows he is not guilty of a crime.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to Troy Downing. Downing is the Big Sky resident \u2014 or sometime vacationer, which is the crux here \u2014 who is hoping to win the Republican nomination to challenge U.S. Sen Jon Tester next year.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>The Bozeman Chronicle reported<\/a> that the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks issued several citations to Downing, alleging that he illegally bought state hunting and fishing licenses at a time when he was paying non-resident taxes and referring on his personal blog to being \u201chome\u201d in California.<\/p>\n

In response to the allegations, his campaign released a statement saying, in part: “Troy spends tens of thousands of dollars to support our wounded warriors in fishing trips in Montana, and, he overpays by tens of thousands of dollars to fish and hunt to support other charities here in Montana. It makes no sense that he would try to skirt a small difference in a resident vs non-resident license in Montana.\u201d<\/p>\n

There it is again, that appeal to logic, as opposed to a categorical denial and the presentation of facts.<\/p>\n

The release also made the charge that \u201cthe liberal Montana FWP deep state is on a witch hunt.\u201d The term \u201cdeep state\u201d has a long history, but Downing apparently used it in reference to career employees buried in state government who follow their own agendas and attack political enemies.<\/p>\n

Whatever he meant by it, it was another deflection, an attempt to shoot the messenger rather than dealing with the message.<\/p>\n

Just as bad was the gratuitous attack on the judge who unsealed the Fish, Wildlife and Parks search warrant application that contained an affidavit detailing the charges against Downing. The Downing campaign said the release of public information was a \u201cpolitically motivated\u201d action by a \u201cDemocrat judge, appointed by Democrat Gov. Schweitzer.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were all sorts of other such instances of whining and question-begging in the release, but not, as far as I know, a single word about the actual charges. The affidavit said Downing filed income taxes as a non-resident in 2013 and 2014, two of the years in which he obtained Montana hunting or fishing licenses.<\/p>\n

If that is not in fact true, couldn\u2019t Downing prove it by simply producing his tax returns? Or is that something he, like Trump, would never do? Likewise with the blog comments, which Fish, Wildlife and Parks quote in the affidavit.<\/p>\n

Did he or did he not write, in 2013, as reported by the Chronicle: \u201cThis part-time Big Sky resident\u2019s latest ventures include throwing grape-stomping parties at his working vineyard on his southern California property\u201d?<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t tell us it would have made no sense for Downing to cut corners. Show us the documents contradicting the allegations made by the deep-state operatives.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not all. Even if Downing is able to prove that those operatives are lying, he\u2019ll still have to explain how a relative newcomer to the state, who lives part-time in the exclusive bubble of Big Sky, could ever presume to represent Montana in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m still trying to decide who had the worst response to last week\u2019s political scandals \u2014 Roy Moore down in Alabama or Troy Downing here in Montana. Moore is the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai and presented them to the chosen people of Montgomery, Ala.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20171,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[3084,6444,6445,1237],"class_list":["post-20170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-jon-tester","tag-roy-moore","tag-troy-downing","tag-u-s-senate","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20170"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20181,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20170\/revisions\/20181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}