Kobach's new lit (hit) piece

Kris Kobach has a new mailer out and it is almost exactly what our source TK predicted it would be.

An excessively large and wordy piece, it asks "Why is Dennis Moore so WORRIED?" on the outside and on the inside, it features 10 claims which we'll debunk one at a time as part of a series we like to call...

Kris Kobach is wrong ten ways from Sunday

First up on the piece, Kobach's standard attack against Moore for voting against deploying the National Guard to the border.*

Congressman Moore, as it turns out, has company on this issue. And, strangely enough, on the lit piece Kris Kobach has a picture of himself with one of the people who agrees with Moore.

Yes, that's right, President George W. Bush opposes militarizing the border (scroll to the end of the interview).

So does Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge.

In fact, Ridge said recently he has seen "no evidence" of terrorists trying to cross the Mexican border, directly refuting one of Kobach's claims.

We have to wonder who voters are going to believe on this issue. The President and the Secretary of Homeland Security...or Kris Kobach and former congressman/current inmate James Traficant?**


* One of the citations Kobach uses on this point is "Vote 196, 5/1/94" which is odd, since that date is almost five years before Dennis Moore was sworn into Congress and a full decade before the actual vote Kobach intends to cite was held. We assume he meant "04" instead, but even then he's wrong, as Vote 196 actually took place on May 19, not May 1. Man, that fact checking is hard work.

** The other citation for this claim doesn't even provide a vote number, simply saying "Vote on H.R. 4205, 2000." We checked and this vote was an amendment offered by then-Congressman and now-Inmate Number 31213-060 at the Allenwood Federal Corrections Institution, James Traficant. Traficant, you'll recall, was sentenced in 2002 to eight years in federal prison for bribery, corruption and tax evasion, and was then expelled from Congress.

Beam me up!