Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Guest Blog: A Pennsylvanian take of Teresa's Heinz' harsh words

A first-ever for Old Hickory's Weblog: guest blogging by my friend Kenn Lippert of Pennsylvania. 
 
I'm sure the Teresa Heinz "Shove it" comment is going to be all over the news, especially Faux.  It is important to realize that the reporter in question (really the opinion page editor) works for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a Scaife owned, RNC lapdog of a rag.  This is the same "newspaper" that pushed and pushed the "Vince Foster was murdered" story long after all the other conservative media outlets had given up on it.
 
It used to be the Greensburg Tribune-Review (a rural eastern suburb of Pittsburgh, out towards that part of Pennsylvania known as 'Arkansas' to some), but when the Pittsburgh Press (a defunct afternoon daily) was on strike the TR tried to move in and call itself Pittsburgh's paper.  The Pittsburgh Post Gazette absorbed the Press, and is the now major Pittsburgh newspaper in town, but the Tribune-Review tries to  lay claim to that as well.

Back when Ricky "Don't look at my dog like that" Santorum  first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1994 , his opponent was Harris Wofford.  Wofford was a Democrat that had been appointed the U.S. Senate seat  after John Heinz's untimely death. Wofford had won the special election to the seat in November 1991.  The Santorum campaign was particularly hard and nasty, Ricky displaying his flair for smirkiness and pomposity all the while wrapping himself in a shroud of conservative Christian values, and foreshadowing the lack of civility we see from the GOP today.  When Teresa Heinz decided not to support Santorum in his race against  Wofford - a champion of civil rights and cofounder of the Peace Corp, Ricky accused her of turning on the Republican party because she was "having an affair with a Senator from Massachusetts.

Teresa began moving away from the what the Republican party was becoming, and  the Greensburg Tribune-Review has had it out for her ever since.

Here's what Tribune-Review writer Dimitri Vassilaros recently wrote:

If Teresa Heinz Kerry did not violate federal election laws to help finance her husband's presidential campaign, why does she refuse to make full financial disclosure? Memo to Teresa: Burn that green pants suit you wore here recently -- and fire any assistants who said it looked good on you.

The Tribune-Review has also published as fact, urban legends about the organizations which the Howard Heinz Endowment supports.  It is no wonder Teresa reacted as she did to Colin McNickle.

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We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

**nods**  Well said.  Rick Santorum is one scarey individual.  Hopefully, Pennsylvanians have had enough of him and his value system.  

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the home-town comment, Kenn!

By the way, Joe Conason agrees with you about Teresa and Scaife, one of the more destructive figures on today's political scene:

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17376

Bruce

Anonymous said...

Bruce - someone sent me stuff on the "urban legends" re the Heinz Foundation's donations and support of various things, i suspected it to be nothing but exactly that, "urban legend" - but i want some links to finding out the truth about this.  it's not enough to just doubt what the rightwing is saying, i want to be able to factually refute.  do you have any suggestions?  does anyone have any?

Anonymous said...

I think what Kenn was probably referring to was mainly the false claim that her foundation had funded Islamic terrorists.  Joe Conason deals with that in the article I mentioned in the earlier comment. - Bruce

Anonymous said...

Here's where you can see what snopes.com has to say about it:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/tides.asp