Soccer Dad

MD4Omalley?

Well, well, well.
David Collins of WBAL TV has done a little more digging and has discovered that the e-mail address of "Freeper" MD4Bush matches that of a former Democratic party operative who is associated with Mayor O'Malley.

Now an e-mail address alone isn't enough to convict anyone of impropriety. E-mail addresses could be spoofed. However it seems pretty clear that MD4Bush was a plant who, according to Jim Robinson of FreeRepublic, may be involved in a dirty trick against Governor Ehrlich:

I feel that a (possibly criminal) political dirty trick has been committed against Governor Ehrlich and Joe Steffen and the evidence would lead any rational thinking person to believe that it was perpetrated by officials of mddems.org, perhaps working in concert with a reporter from the Washington Post.

After this story first broke, I was startled to discover an email address from mddems.org associated with the MD4Bush account and then even more startled when I discovered logins to that account from the Washington Post's server. I posted my suspicions early on and almost welcomed a subpoena from any investigative committee that might be interested. Not surprisingly, the Democrat controlled committees were not interested in following leads on Democrat corruption.

Collins, to be fair, doesn't go as far as Robinson. And when he was on the Bruce Elliott hosted Ron Smith show, Collins was reticent to go as far Elliott was willing to go. But Elliott is a talking head; Collins is a reporter - it is not his job to draw conclusions but to report facts.

If this story is accurate, it will damage O'Malley's chances to reach the governor's mansion, as he will be tied to a dirty trick. It could also have implications at the Washington Post where reporter Matthew Mosk may have taken advantage of unauthorized access to FreeRepublic to break the MD4Bush story. Worse if he knowingly received the damaging inforamtion from a Democratic party operative, he will have compromised his paper's claim to impartiality in the upcoming 2006 gubernatorial race in Maryland.