Candidate defends against attack ad

I have spent the last 10 months in House District 4. All the people there want to talk about is getting back to work. I will stay on message and be the public servant for these folks. With this service in mind, I must defend myself against a horrible ad run last week in the Flathead Beacon, a new weekly in the valley.

My beliefs have been distorted by my opponents. I have always believed in civil rights for all and believe the Civil War, while tragic, was necessary to abolish slavery and maintain this great union. I believe in equal rights for all religions and believe that those who participated in the holocaust were murderers who caused the deaths of 6 million Jews.

I believe in limited government, not government overthrow. I have many times said that we live in the greatest constitutional republic in history, and it must be protected and preserved, not torn apart.

I am doubly insulted by these lies in the fact that my grandmother was Jewish, and therefore had I lived under the rule of the Nazis, I, too, would have been exterminated. The level of insult runs deeper still when you consider that I have many African American friends down south, and one of them is the incredible outreach minister who presided over my marriage to the most caring woman I know.

That having been said, I think it is significant to note that the pictures used in the ad were gleaned from Tea Party rallies this summer. If I was to use the stretch of logic that made me guilty by association in their piece, does that not make all the hundreds of folks at those freedom rallies in the Flathead this summer “hate based extremists”?

Don’t worry friends — that logic failed in their ad, and it fails here as well. I am honored to be part of the freedom movement in the Flathead, and it is with humble pride that I help teach the foundations of our government to multiple groups weekly. The energy of the Tea Parties will reinvigorate the republic and save us from ourselves.

The politics of personal destruction are alive and well in the North Valley. It appears that you can quote items from a radical extreme-leftist blog site, add a few footnotes to make it appear legitimate, stretch the “guilt by association” tactic to the breaking point, and poof — an ad. You just have to place a picture of Hitler in for final effect.

The fact is these attacks have been steadily getting worse online for months, and the cumulative trauma to my wife and children have become almost unbearable. The blog strategy could be summed up as: If you cannot beat me in the arena of ideas and solutions, then attack my wife and children and call into question my character a few days out from absentee-ballot shipping in an attempt to tweak a few points from the uninformed voter. How insulting to us all.

The tragedy here is that this type of Washington politics can only damage the entire political process. How many of you good folks have said to me in the last few days that this is exactly why you would never run for office? I abhor this behavior, as it weakens immeasurably the body politic when good people will not become involved out of a fear for their reputations from both sides of the political spectrum.

We must denounce this tactic and recognize it for the cancer that it is. Anonymous bloggers and keyboard cowgirls have spewed out their hate and in the dark of the night create manifestos to harm us all with their filth. This is a stain on our great valley.

Derek Skees lives in Kalispell and is the Republican candidate for House District 4.