SUBMITTED RELEASE FROM FRIENDS FOR HARRY REID
LAS VEGAS–If you missed it, you’re certainly excused.
The latest major development relating to the scandal now threatening to derail Sue Lowden’s U.S. Senate campaign happened late Friday evening, Pacific Time. In a dust-up over the “Chickens for Checkups” debacle on the political talk show Face to Face, Lowden campaign manager Robert Uithoven expounded on Lowden’s vision for health care–saying she agreed with Gov. Jim Gibbons that health insurance reform was unconstitutional and that everybody in America already does have health care: emergency room care. In perhaps the most crass terms yet showing how out-of-touch these folks are, her campaign chief matter-of-factly quipped:
“If I have a bullet hole in my chest, I’m gonna go down to UMC and I’m gonna get health care.”
(By way of background, UMC is the only public hospital in the state of Nevada.)
At the same time Uithoven was taking the Lowden campaign’s exposure on health care to a new level, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was dressing down Lowden’s latest attempt to put out the fire now raging among folks in DC over BarterGate–an op ed in the insider publication Politico in which she claimed: “The comment I made about bartering was not, and was never intended to be, a policy proposal.” Unfortunately for Lowden, Olbermann’s producers had a field day with what an NFL official might call “irrefutable video evidence” to the contrary.
But even more damning–not included in Olbermann’s piece–is a memo that was circulated by the Lowden campaign in the earlier days of this brouhaha. Not only do they refuse to back down from her statements, they defend the policy of bartering with a long background document. They even went to far as to have Robin Titus, a former GOP opponent of Reid’s, pen a letter documenting that bartering for health care was a practice that works empirically. (The campaign subsequently pushed around that letter as further evidence bartering was a legitimate policy option.)
“As her campaign continues to spiral downward, Sue Lowden will do or say anything she thinks might help her get out from under this self-inflicted ‘Chickens for Checkups’ wound–including bald-faced lies to DC insiders about her past statements on bartering,” said Reid campaign communications director Kelly Steele. “Beyond the lies, her campaign’s latest missive about getting gunshot treatment at your local ER has elevated them from out-of-touch to living in another world.”
“Also, how do you know how many chickens to bring and how can you carry them all if you’re bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound?” asked Steele.
