The person in charge of the Bath County Republicans Facebook page is either painfully dumb or a liar, though it’s possible, could be both.
The page author posted an edited screenshot of an article that I wrote last month about Jena Crisler, the Democratic Party nominee for the 35th District seat in the House of Delegates, to make it appear that Crisler said in an interview with me that she doesn’t live in the district.
Where the author of the Bath County Republicans Facebook page is possibly just painfully dumb is, it was obvious to anyone with a first-grade education that it was me writing about how I don’t live within the 35th District boundaries anymore.
“The wide-expanse district – which stretches from Bath County, into Highland County, through the western half of Augusta County, to the northeast into a corner of Rockingham County – is still where I spent the bulk of my life,” I wrote in the lede to the article on Crisler, which was published on Sept. 8.
ICYMI
Because that’s my story – I was born in Staunton, in King’s Daughters’ Hospital, long-since shuttered, spent the first three years of my life in Deerfield, on the western edge of Augusta County, grew up in Crimora, in the northeast corner of Augusta County, and then returned there to live for my first few years out of college.
That was me, as a writer, setting my qualifications for writing a story about Jena Crisler, letting you know, I’m no carpetbagger here, somebody writing for a local news outlet who doesn’t know where places like Crimora and Deerfield are, that in fact, I lived in a house in Deerfield without indoor plumbing as a young child, grew up in a trailer park in Crimora, then went on to presumably make something of myself after.
Meanwhile, Jena Crisler, the story makes clear, is “a medical doctor who lives in Port Republic, in the southeast corner of Rockingham County.”
This was pointed out numerous times to the author of the Bath County Republicans Facebook page, who posted the altered screenshot on Monday morning, timestamp: 8:06 a.m.
The response from the page author: to double down.
“That’s your choice to make but it does not change the facts. God bless you,” this author person wrote to one commenter who asked for a correction.
That one was timestamped 8:33 a.m.
This matter involving the altered screenshot was brought to my attention early in the afternoon, and I posted a comment to the thread at 3:21 p.m.
“Not her words. You need to correct this. Embarrassing misread on the part of whoever runs this page.”
I’m writing and finishing the editing on this column around 4:30 p.m.
No corrections, the photo is still there, everything.
Seems to me at this point that we’ve gotten past the Bath County Republicans just being painfully dumb, and into the realm of being out-and-out liars.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor issue – a lie told to help a candidate in a local state-legislative race, weighed against the backdrop of Donald Trump and his minions lying about Portland and Chicago being “war-ravaged,” among a million and a billion other things the MAGAs in DC have been up to the past 10 years.
It doesn’t speak well of the Republican side in the 35th, where Chris Runion is running for re-election, and I thought, based on chatting with him at the Rockingham County Fair a couple of years ago, that he was a pretty standup guy.
ICYMI
I’m thinking now that maybe I should take those nice words back.
Sadly, I don’t expect Runion to issue a statement walking this nonsense from the Bath County Republicans back, which, me saying I don’t expect that might tell you how pathetic I think things are right now.
That people will just flat-out lie to other people because they think it might get them another vote or two, and we’re all just supposed to sit back and shrug our shoulders and pretend that lying isn’t a big deal anymore.
Shame on all y’all, basically.
Support AFP
Share
Chris Graham
