The Arizona Senatorial Race Gets Nasty and Receives National Attention
I really wanted to entitle this post, “Festering Fictions by Flake” but did not want to keep it for an F Day Post.
Jeff Flake is playing dirty with an attack ad featuring Cristina Beato against political opponent, war hero, doctor, swat team leader, and former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. For the best summary of what has turned into a pretty nasty campaign I recommend this article Flake is Desperate from Blog for Arizona, as well as the ad that is a rebuttal of the Flake ad:
BACKGROUND
For those who don’t know the basics of the race. The Carmona – Flake race is to fill the Senate seat that Jon Kyl vacated with his retirement.
Jon Kyl
Born and raised in Iowa, he became a carpet bagger in Arizona through law school in Tucson, working in a huge monied and powerful law firm in Phoenix
then he headed up the ultra-neocon group, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, before he moved into official (the Chamber is extremely political) political office. So even though he was Arizona Senator or Congressperson for decades, he never lived among Arizona people in anything other than an isolated, upper class strata. Our other Senator, John McCain, has a similarly distant experience with the real Arizona. He moved to Arizona to be with his much younger second wife Cindy Hensley and landed in office in 1982 from a newly created district. Cindy Hensley McCain is the the daughter of a beer distributor, convicted felon, and probable mafia connected Jim Hensley. He never worked a day in Arizona, he moved to Arizona when he married into an “underworld” family, and was in Congress within a couple of years. He spent no time in the midst of real Arizonans.
Kyl was one of the most conservative Republicans in the senate from 1994 onward and in the Congress from 1986 to 1994. OpenSecrets.com summarizes his lifetime political backers as having given funds as follows:
| Sector | Total | PACs | Indivs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agribusiness | $865,044 | $356,413 | $508,631 |
| Communications/Electronics | $767,951 | $378,478 | $389,473 |
| Construction | $782,988 | $253,969 | $529,019 |
| Defense | $393,110 | $306,600 | $86,510 |
| Energy & Natural Resources | $947,222 | $583,865 | $363,357 |
| Finance, Insurance & Real Estate | $4,225,962 | $1,177,978 | $3,047,984 |
| Health | $2,138,835 | $1,054,027 | $1,084,808 |
| Lawyers & Lobbyists | $1,546,087 | $189,023 | $1,357,064 |
| Transportation | $800,882 | $338,819 | $462,063 |
| Misc Business | $2,290,730 | $666,693 | $1,624,037 |
| Labor | $21,700 | $21,700 | $0 |
| Ideological/Single-Issue | $1,465,826 | $764,995 | $700,831 |
| Other | $1,896,298 | $13,100 | $1,883,198 |
Flake
Arizona has had nothing resembling Senators interested in the people and well-being of Arizona for a long, time. Jeff Flake probably thought he was “due” for advancement into a Senate seat when he began his run for Senate because of his 6 terms as Congressman. His family is an old, well established Mormon family in Arizona. He is from the Flakes of Snowflake, Arizona. The Flake family has connections to several other Mormon families whose surnames you might recognize such as Romney, Pearce, and Udall, I recommend that if this interests you, that read all about it a bit about the history of the Mormon political machine at: Arizona’s Secret History.
The use of a women, whose claims against Carmona did not hold up under scrutiny on Capitol Hill, by the Flake campaign is a bit more than merely disingenuous, the ad is all innuendo and hinting at something sinister, but doesn’t say what. It is the worst kind of attempted character assassination, the kind that is seamy and seedy and amorphous. If this is an indication of the type of Senator Flake would make, well, it is disturbing.
Carmona
Carmona had been approached by the Republican Party of Arizona for a run a few years ago but he declined. He has been an independent most of his life and when he was Surgeon General of the United States under a Republican President he was disillusioned by the corruption, overt lies, and politicizing of health and science on Capitol Hill. His biography is filled with the stuff that myth says builds true leaders: self made man, special forces veteran, medical school, specialization as a trauma surgeon, side service as a deputy and SWAT team leader, community involvement, national service to the President of the U.S. I’ve written about Carmona before and you can certainly go to his website or read a New Yorker article about him to find out more.