By Fred Baker of ghost32writer.com
There’s no basis to the lawsuit, but CD2 candidate Chuck Wooten is finding it necessary to spray for political cockroaches anyway. On June 13 (Friday the Thirteenth, no less!), Shelley Kais made good on her bizarre threat to “seek legal means” to have some of Wooten’s petition signatures disqualified. She said she’d do that last month when–
–hey, wait just a Richard Nixon minute! The Arizona Star article doesn’t list Kais as the one filing suit at all!
This is getting curiouser and curiouser. Let me think … oh, that’s right. I published a post shortly after she made that threat, pointing out that I’d been in the room when Shelley herself had stated unequivocally that the question of Chuck Wooten’s legitimacy as a Republican had been completely settled. Could it be that my remarks destroyed her usefulness as a diversion attack dog for the Martha McSally campaign?
Nah…nobody really listens to me…do they?
Well, enough about that. Let’s take a look at the Star article, shall we?
Star: Congressional candidate Chuck Wooten is facing a lawsuit that seeks to throw him off the ballot long before the Republican primary in August.
No, it’s not. The lawsuit may state that in its legalese, but that’s not the goal here. It cannot be the goal because every political hack out there devoted to preventing Chuck Wooten’s election is fully aware there’s no real issue. Short of owning a judge, this lawsuit doesn’t have a chance. What the people behind it really seek is to muddy the waters, confuse the voters if possible, perhaps do a little character assassination along the way.
Star: Former Tucson mayoral candidate and fellow Republican Shaun McClusky filed the lawsuit, claiming at least 770 of 1,892 Wooten’s signatures should be disqualified.
Hm. Joe Ferguson of the Star (it’s his byline on the article) seems a bit of a lightweight in the article research department. According to my sources, two people filed the suit. Shaun McClusky was one, the other being Lori Dzuban Oien. Both are Republicans, at least, but both have also taken flyers at local politics and failed, McClusky in a Tucson mayoral run and Oien in an effort to get on the City Council…and get this: Oien is a known McSally acolyte.
Dirty tricks of Richard Nixon caliber? One wonders.
Star: McClusky said he felt those signing Wooten’s signature didn’t realize he had registered with the GOP two months after he announced he was running for the Congressional District 2 seat.
Wooten said at the time that the party registration issue was an oversight, blaming it on county employees.
A majority of the disputed signatures, McClusky argues, were signed on Republican partisan nomination forms at a time when Wooten was not registered with the party.
Yeah, right. “McClusky …felt ….” Wasn’t that the same McClusky who did get caught out and disqualified when it came to signatures for his mayoral campaign? Let me check my archives…yep.
Over time, McClusky has told a lot of stories about petitions and signatures. He’s even pushed several different versions of the story behind his own failure to get on the ballot, blaming everyone from a campaign manager who didn’t get the petitions he had out of the trunk of his car to the failure of an elderly campaign volunteer who somehow allowed errors in signing the affidavits for the petitions. But hey, attacking the elderly is right in the ballpark for a guy who calls himself Captain Chaos.
Shaun’s anti-Chuck muck uses the same “material” Shelley Kais originally tried. When the issue came up, Wooten immediately had it checked out by the voter registration folks. He never stated that it was an error by a county employee (again, faulty article research by the Star). Instead, the county investigated and discovered that the MVD had made an error. Chuck had filled out his registration form as a Republican when he moved to Arizona in 2011. To square things away, the registration was corrected in the records and a new voter registration card was issued to Chuck Wooten with the correct date (2011).
Thus, Wooten has been registered as a Republican in Arizona for years, not months, and the DTB (Dirty Tricks Bumblers) know it full well. Here’s a photo of Chuck‘s voter registration card as it stands today.
Star: If all the 770 signatures are invalidated next week by a judge, it would leave Wooten 145 short of the minimum to qualify as a candidate for Congressional District 2.
That would leave only two other Republican candidates: former Air Force Col. Martha McSally and small-business owner Shelley Kais.
Wooten could not be immediately reached for comment but has already filed paperwork vowing to fight the lawsuit filed by McClusky.
You bet Chuck Wooten has already filed paperwork. After all, he’s facing a rather renowned and uber-costly law firm representing the other side–which is a head scratcher in itself. McClusky and Oien have that kind of coin to toss around when they’re not even in the race? I don’t think so. So…who’s footing the bill? The big government RINO machine? You know, McCain, Kyl, et al? Shucks, John McCain spent many millions of his own dollars in his last Senate primary; this would be chump change for him.
Bottom line, the timing is fascinating, the lawsuit being filed mere days after newcomer Dave Brat knocked out House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia’s 7th District. There’s nothing like fear of losing an election to a superior candidate to inspire desperate and even ridiculous tactics in political animals–including a political animal like Martha McSally, whose win-loss record wouldn’t even keep her on the roster in minor league baseball.
Is the former A-10 Warthog pilot involved in this farce? Would the voters living in Arizona CD2 be better off if we could mothball McSally and keep the Warthog flying?
For now, there are only questions. On August 26, when we go to the polls, perhaps we’ll find the answers.