As noted here last week, long-term incumbent Republican Fred Upton is facing a primary challenge in Michigan's 6th congressional district from former state representative Jack Hoogendyk. It is a contest between establishment Republican arrogance and tea party constitutionalism. The primary election is tomorrow, August 3. Judging by a curious mailing sent to Republican voters in the district, the incumbent is sweating a bit in the summer heat.

On Monday, sixth district Republicans received a postcard from representatives of the Ku Klux Klan endorsing Hoogendyk in the primary. The Klan mailer arrived directly from the Aryan capital, Harrison, Arizona.

If you have never heard of Harrison, Arizona it is because the place does not exist.

It is, of course, impossible at this time to conclude whether the mailer was a sophomoric prank by Fred Upton's campaign, or even Obama acolytes doing the only thing they know how to do out of concern that a pliable Republican like Upton may be in danger. The source may never be discovered, but their work is revealing.

There is nothing so incandescent in American life as the charge "racist." As we have seen in the upper reaches of the Justice Department, it is also the last refuge of scoundrels incapable of relying on reason or the rule of law. Now it is unleashed in a desperate attempt at clinging to office; to smear a good man who recognizes the floor of Congress was not meant to be a den of vipers trading earmarks like baseball cards.

This stunt is, if possible, simultaneously laughable and infuriating. The desperation is comic, but the insinuation that Hoogendyk or any true conservative would welcome such an endorsement is what passes for creativity on the left. Their actions bring to mind the colorful putdown penned by Abigail Adams when describing the participants of Shay's Rebellion: "Ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principles have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretence of grievances which have no existence but in their own imaginations." What could better describe the left and its dupes?

Only one question remains for the opponents of Jack Hoogendyk working poll sites on primary day: Will the leaflets accusing a nineteenth-century Hoogendyk ancestor of impregnating Sally Hemings be in color or black and white?

 

Matthew May welcomes comments at matthewtmay@yahoo.com