When One Transparent Fraud Deserves Another

If you’d care to see a sample of how the news media gets things so out of whack they’ll actually tell you that black is white, get a load of the front page of Thursday’s Detroit News.

There, anchoring the left page, is the headline, “Patterson calls for probe of Tea Party.” Scan only that headline, as many readers do, and you’d have to believe that those tea party folks must be in trouble, right?

But you’d be wrong.

The headline should be reading: “Former Director of Oakland County Democratic Party Caught Red-Handed at Election Fraud.”

The crook, Jason Bauer, is the former Director of Operations for the Oakland County Democratic Party. For this story the News demotes him to “an Oakland County Democratic Party staffer.” Maybe that’ll help give Bauer’s close associates in the party a head start as they put as much distance between him and themselves as they can.

Bauer and his cronies created a phony entity they named “The Tea Party,” intending to run candidates (at least 23) for state offices. Bauer used his notary license to sign phony affidavits and even got one guy on the ballot who lives in Phoenix and had no idea what was going on. By drawing off voters fooled by the phony “Tea party” label, they hope to split the Republican vote. That helps Democrats win more seats the way they so often like to do -- by cheating.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson got wind of it and now is asking the circuit court to appoint a one-man grand jury to investigate. The Oakland County prosecutor also asked for a criminal investigation by the sheriff’s department, and the county elections clerk “also asked local, state and federal offices to investigate after she learned of two other suspicious filings for political office -- all linked to Bauer.”

I hope these guys end up in LOTS of trouble. But Patterson is not probing THE tea party, as no real tea party candidates are in any trouble over this, only Democrats. (Nor is the tea party a political party, anyway). The Detroit News headline implies exactly the opposite of what’s really going on. The kind of people who would get behind a headline like this are the same kind who would like to rob tea-party supporters of their votes by tricking them into casting ballots for phony candidates instead of real Republican candidates.

I thought you should know your newspaper is either lying to you or is guilty of grossly negligent editing.