You may recall from last week that Ms. Carol Shea-Porter got herself in a bit of hot water over the following quote about the secret cabals out there trying to destroy our democracy, or something: “They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.*”  This gem was from a ABC News article wherein the news group interviewed four politicians who had their heads handed to them in the last election, so as you can imagine, there was some bitterness involved.

Now, WMUR has decided to chime in on this, indicating that Ms. Shea-Porter** is attempting to ‘clarify’ the story, which was widely seen as at least implying that the former Congresswoman was blaming her election loss on rampaging Chinese hordes.  The claim is that Shea-Porter was speaking generally, and that she had not intended to suggest that said Chinese influence had had anything to do with her election.  This argument will probably work for anybody who thought that Ms. Shea-Porter was a shining example of Congressional majesty – which is to say, the class of people who are often impolitely designated as having ‘room temperature IQs.’  For the rest of us: read on.

The WMUR article is more or less based around a Hill article that – oddly enough! – WMUR neglected to link to, but you can read here.  When you do read it, you’ll note that the Hill itself reported that Ms. Shea-Porter’s office specifically referenced the recent Citizens United case that overthrew several odious restrictions on free speech (not that Shea-Porter would have used that adjective, even assuming that she could correctly spell it). That is important because it has been widely noted that the Citizens United case would allow the US Chamber of Commerce to exercise its First Amendment rights more freely.  And that is important because, back in October, noted Left-porn site Think Progress claimed that the US Chamber of Commerce was supposedly a front office for the aforementioned Chinese hordes (among others).  And that is important because, as was noted last week, the US Chamber of Commerce ran ads against Ms. Carol Shea-Porter in the last two weeks of the campaign.

Now, I’m just a right-wing blogger and ideologue, to be sure – but it seems to me that when a hard Left Congresswoman is talking about foreign interests in elections, and her fellow travelers have been busily trying to tag one specific group as being beholden to those foreign interests, and that one specific group had in fact specifically targeted her campaign… well, it does not beggar the imagination to conclude that THE WOMAN WAS IMPLYING THAT FOREIGN POWERS CONSPIRED AGAINST HER IN HER LAST ELECTION. It’s absurd, of course – but then, so is Carol Shea-Porter, so it all evens out in the end.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Yeah, that comment just doesn’t get any more coherent the older it gets, huh?

**Do you have any idea how pleasant it is to type that Ms. out?