No more joking about McKinley's 2020 reelection campaign -- it's on and Ogden papers are ready to do their part

My subheading on yesterday's post about local congressman David McKinley joked that the Intelligencer was launching the McKinley reelection campaign with editor Mike Myer's Saturday column. Despite the fact that we are almost 20 months away from the congressional election, I was wrong to joke -- today's front page makes it clear that the Ogden campaign to get McKinley reelected has begun. Down the left side of the front page are 1150 words of total fluff from Ogden stenographer Steven Allen Adams. The headline:

McKinley Takes Issues Back To Congress

(Where else would he take them?)

Here's my favorite McKinley claim in an article filled with unchallenged McKinley assertions:

McKinley said these are just some of the 300 meetings he has every year when he returns to the 1st Congressional District, which includes all of the Northern Panhandle and stretches from Wood County in the west to Mineral County in the east.

Adams provides no pushback. 300 meetings in 365 days across a district that size? When does he sleep? Eat? Do his job in Washington? All I can figure is that McKinley counts everything. Whether he's talking to the next person in line while waiting for a fish sandwich at Coleman's or giving his car keys to a parking attendant -- those must count as meetings with constituents. How else could he get to 300 meetings last year?

I also like that Adams brought up the Lugar Index (see previous post) so that McKinley would get his own chance to pat himself on the back.

As will be the case in all future McKinley articles, a picture of the congressman is included.

Michelle Malkin in the opinion section

My Friday post looked at Thursday's Wheeling News-Register editorial that purported to be about dispelling stereotypes about the Muslim community. (Actually, it was mostly about absolving the Republican Party of any responsibility in allowing a racist poster to appear at "Republicans Take the Rotunda" day at the capitol rotunda.) The motivation for the editorial came from the announcement that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) had been invited to the West Virginia capitol to improve relationships with Muslim-Americans. Here is what I wrote:

Without any evidence, the editorial connects CAIR to Hamas. I spent more than a few minutes trying to prove or disprove the assertion, but my search could only yield page after page of the usual rightwing attacks: Breitbart, National Review, Michelle Malkin et al who all make the connection. I could not draw a conclusion because absent from those pages are sources from the mainstream media. Note - the original AP story makes no reference to Hamas in describing CAIR.

Guess who's column appears in today's Opinion section and guess who she is attacking? Yes, it's Michelle Malkin and most of the column is an attack on CAIR. It begins by attacking Muslim representative Ilhan Omar and defending President Trump and Fox News analysts Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson but it quickly shifts to attacking CAIR by asking us to "never forget." An example:

Never forget: CAIR works every day to silence Muslim reformers, apostates, Christians, Jews, infidel scholars, border security advocates, anti-sharia activists and investigative independent journalists, on college campuses, TV airwaves and the internet, to prevent us from exposing the truth about Islamic supremacism.

Malkin uses the phrase "never forget"as an organizational device a total of eight times. Hmmm, "never forget"-- that's familiar. Yes, now I remember:

Did the repeated phrase in Malkin's racist column come from the racist poster or more likely, is this is a racist right wing meme that they both used? Nice to see that the News-Register has no problem running the column although I found it interesting that they changed the syndicator's title for the column:

Never Forget: CAIR's Dirty Deeds

to:

Never Surrender to CAIR

"Never Forget" may have been a little too close to its Republican home in West Virginia.