March 14, 2010 09:13 PM UTC

SHOCKER: Attack Groups "Play Dirty"

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• by: Colorado Pols

With caucuses just a couple of days away, the local conservative blogosphere is crying foul over an apparently pro-Senate candidate Ken Buck ‘independent’ message group’s tactics. The details don’t really seem all that scandalous, or in any event substantiated by much more than innuendo, but high dudgeon is the order of the day from the Independence Institute’s Ben DeGrow:

In short, the Taxpayers for Liberty survey is a dishonest and underhanded scheme implemented by a shadowy group, and its “results” utterly worthless. If only we knew the extent of its reach…

Ken Buck ought to come out and publicly condemn the tactics used by TFL, third parties that are seeking to manipulate the game to his benefit. Were he to pursue that course, I and many others would be impressed by Buck’s courage and integrity. The longer he stays silent, though, the more questions will linger about the nature of the relationship between his campaign and this rogue group. And that wouldn’t be healthy for Ken Buck or for the Republican Party.

Anyway, DeGrow takes his usual thousand words to essentially relate a he-said-she-said story alleging that this group never mailed Buck’s opponent Jane Norton their “candidate survey.” Since his only corroboration on that charge comes from, you know, the Norton campaign, it’s tough to get overly worked up–and it’s harder still to imagine that this one obscure group and their little survey are going to meaningfully affect Tuesday’s caucus one way or the other.

No, making a bunch of plaintive noise about some little-known group “playing dirty” (clutch those pearls! Wasn’t Norton the one playing dirty last fall?), indeed making the discussion about this group’s ‘tactics’ instead of the candidates, is something we think serves Norton’s purposes going into Tuesday more than the ‘Taxpayers for Liberty’ could ever help Buck.