I applaud patriot Lloyd Marcus for his support of GOP primary candidate Kelli Ward as she runs to fill outgoing Jeff Flake's Arizona Senate seat.  There's a huge concern, however, on what remains as a largely unsolved problem with the August 28 primary contenders.

This could be Ward's race to win, if she can get out in front of a third-rail problem, which the local and potentially national mainstream media might use as a weapon to sink her campaign.

"ChemTrail Kelli Ward."

Senator Mitch McConnell's PAC didn't invent this last year in a pre-emptive cheap-shot support effort of Jeff Flake before Flake's aborted re-election campaign.  It's real.  Ward held an embarrassing public constituency meeting in 2014 where she did nothing to dispel the anti-science, anti-intellectual conspiracy theory about "chemtrails."  A year later, when pressed on the event, she said (near the bottom of an article about her run against John McCain), "I don't really have any opinions about 'chemtrails' one way or the other. I think that environmental quality, though, is very important."

Perhaps the local Arizona Republic newspaper is restraining itself on the use of the "ChemTrail Kelli" label in hopes that she will win the primary, whereupon it can hand this weapon to Representative Kyrsten Sinema, whom they essentially endorsed over the weekend for the Democrat primary.

Rep. Sinema has maintained a low profile as a centrist ever since the Democrat hierarchy apparently toned her down from her previous far-left appearance.  Back in 2010, when she first began her run for Congress, another local Arizona news outlet speculated that her self-imposed "Prada socialist" label might doom her election chances.

With that kind of Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders-like skeleton in Sinema's closet, you'd think filling Jeff Flake's Senate seat with a genuine conservative would be easy.

Instead, it's a troubling situation.  Of the other two GOP primary contenders, there is internationally famous "World's Toughest Sheriff" Joe Arpaio, who has basically had zero public presence since filing his candidacy.

Rep. Martha McSally claims to be a principled conservative who supports President Trump, but the centrist stance that allowed her to win the House seat formerly held by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords and Ron Barber raises the question of whether she's changing now in order to win the Senate seat or was very conservative from the start but buried it in order to win her House seat.  If McSally wins the primary, it might lead to a mutual-annihilation general election mud fest on whether she or Sinema is the more insincere poser who will say anything to get elected.

Then there's Ward.  If she wins the primary, it doesn't matter what her position is, principled conservative or otherwise.  If she is portrayed as a chemtrail conspiracy-believer, her general election is doomed, and Sinema will simply stand aside in a cakewalk into the Senate, while Ward twists in the wind. 

How might this problem be solved?  Ward could go on immediate full offense, smashing the "ChemTrail Kelli" label via an in-your-face taunt of the national mainstream media with a policy statement such as this:

The latest round of frivolous anti-science global warming lawsuits is based on accusations about "industry-paid skeptic climate scientist shills" that is as bad as wacko conspiracy theories put out by 9-11 Truthers and believers in chemtrail conspiracy.

Standing up to the media is one of the main points that swept President Trump into power.  Such a statement from Ward would focus the spotlight squarely onto the MSM's 20-year-plus failure to do their jobs on checking the veracity of Al Gore's "crooked skeptics" accusation.  If she shows this kind of leadership, she wins the votes of all of us who've long been demanding that politicians stop caving in to mainstream media narratives and finally hold them accountable for being the existential threat to the well-being of the country they are increasingly becoming.

Russell Cook's blog GelbspanFiles.com is a forensic examination of faults in the corruption accusation against skeptic climate scientists, an outgrowth of his original articles here at American Thinker.  He can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.