The GOP should stop the whisper campaign against veterans.
/By Sussex Watchdog
An old operator we knew once demonstrated how – through the use of rumors and gossip – someone could make something false become common and accepted knowledge. It was said of a prospective female candidate that she “was the only woman who could scratch her back with her hind leg.” One person was told, then another, and another… and soon enough, upon meeting this candidate, people would take to eyeing her up strangely, wondering how she managed it. It was the one thing everyone seemed to know about her.
This is called the “whisper campaign” style of politics and it used to be the way political campaigns were conducted in Sussex County (and elsewhere). This oral, pre-literate style of politics was challenged by the printed word in the news coverage provided by the old New Jersey Herald. The introduction of a more democratic, modern style of campaigning in the county also helped to sweep away the primacy of the mouth-to-mouth gossiping that went on between the 500 or so people who “mattered most” in the county. The Herald reached a lot more than 500 “insiders” as does modern campaigning, provided you have a message and the resources to broadcast it.
The decline of newspaper coverage in less populated counties, like Sussex, matched the rise of digital coverage through local news platforms and blogs. About 2006, blogging became a thing in Sussex County. This was in response to a particularly nasty whisper campaign concerning the health of then Senator Bob Littell. The gossips had an assist from a Trenton-based blog, now defunct, and from the Trenton establishment itself. This included the NJGOP and the GOP Senate caucus. Both were conducting a Jihad to “retire” incumbent GOP Senators of a certain age.
In 2012, a local blog uncovered a plot to turn county waste disposal over to a private vendor at an enormous cost to taxpayers. Their coverage nixed the deal and the county had to admit that the current landfill, operated by SCMUA, would be adequate for at least three more decades. The power of citizen journalism was evident again during the solar scandal that ripped-off taxpayers in several counties, including Sussex and Morris. And again, during the Andover nursing home scandal – when bodies were piling up and the County Commissioners did an about face and meekly backed down on investigating what later proved to be a corrupt enterprise. We will never know how many might have been saved if the Commissioners had acted.
With the loss of the local news coverage once provided by the New Jersey Herald, the old whisper-campaign is making a comeback. The gossips’ latest targets are veterans – in particular, veterans who served in combat.
Recently, veterans -- combat veterans, in particular -- have been targeted by bureaucrats in the Biden and Murphy administrations. It is the cruelest irony that the limp politicians who talk war and send people to fight and die, betray them this way. Just as they betray those who come home with the scars of war, when they toss them to an underfunded and undervalued VA.
Among those combat veterans prominent in Sussex County Republican circles are County Sheriff Mike Strada (Desert Storm), Republican Chairman Joe Labarbera (Afghanistan and Iraq), and former Lafayette Mayor Carl Luthman (Vietnam). Mayor Luthman challenged Chris Carney for County Commissioner in 2021 and is a possible candidate for Dawn Fantasia’s vacant seat on the Commissioner Board, in the likely event that she wins an Assembly seat in November. Luthman is a decorated helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and among the first amputees to return to active military duty.
Those on the receiving end of the whisper campaign report that the gossips are attempting to raise concerns over the “stability” of combat veterans. It is a filthy slander, aimed at those who have given the most to defend America, and spread about by people who never served a day in uniform.
Of course, the way to address gossip is to bring it into the sunlight and debate it directly through the written word. The gossips – oral and subliterate as they are – always attack the vehicles that turn their shadowy gossip into open debate. Now is no different, and there have been calls by these gossips to suppress the written word. Some politicians and their supporters have even suggested that a law should be passed to have government suppress free speech that is inconvenient or unsupportive of status quo politicians. This recalls the late Chris Hitchens’ famous rejoinder to such nonsense:
Hitchens' words address those who support New Jersey's first-in-the-nation "misinformation" mandate for schoolchildren.
