Peculiar

Even here in the post-apocalyptic wastes of Trumpland, what does it take to get one Democrat to stand with another in a race for the last available Senate seat?  Apparently it still takes a week or so.

Fayard endorsed Campbell on Tuesday (Nov. 15), a week after the public service commissioner advanced to a runoff against state Treasurer John Kennedy, R-Madisonville, to replace retiring Sen. David Vitter, R-La. Fayard, a lawyer from New Orleans, finished fourth.

 "After the setbacks suffered last week by the Democratic Party nationally,‎ it gives me great hope to know that Foster Campbell will protect President Obama's legacy and fight for the same Democratic Party values that Secretary Clinton, myself, and so many others have championed," she said in a statement.

That's nice of her to say. It would be nicer to have a statement that says something about what Senator Campbell would do for Louisiana other than just observe Obama's, Clinton's and Fayard's "values."  But I'm not advising either Fayard or Campbell so they can write whatever they think is proper.

What, by the way, should we imagine this was all about? 

But Fayard's support did appear to come with a price. Before the endorsement announcement, Campbell campaign spokeswoman Mary-Patricia Wray took to Twitter to apologize to Fayard and her family. The tweet was later deleted, but Fayard retweeted a screenshot of it:

This is a step in the right direction to join forces. I look forward to hearing more of what @CampbellforLa has to say. #lasen pic.twitter.com/fboc1Bqy76

— Caroline Fayard (@Caroline_Fayard) November 14, 2016

"Ms. Fayard had some peculiar demands and we tried to meet them all," Wray said Tuesday.

Sure, we're in this situation where a fascistic con man has ascended to the Presidency and is surrounding himself with freaks and monsters. And the Republicans control all of Congress which they are about to use to roll us all back to the Nineteenth Century.  But, ok. Caroline Fayard, commander of 12 percent of the vote in the Louisiana Senate primary, has some demands.

Now, don't get me wrong. I could see why this might matter had some specific issue animated her campaign that she now wanted carried forward.  But the Fayard campaign wasn't about anything besides how great it is that Caroline Fayard is a young-ish lawyer from a wealthy family who founded "a friggin airline company."  Apparently their peculiar demand was that one of Campbell's spokespeople tweeted, "I'm sorry." Because we are all in the fifth grade now.

Worse, the Times-Pic article relaying all of this to us attempts to conflate whatever that apology was about to the independent activity of some "online blogs."

In an ad that ran in early October, Fayard accused Campbell of attacking her family, although she didn't provide details. Fayard is the daughter of Calvin Fayard, a successful Denham Springs trial lawyer and major political fundraiser with strong ties to the Clintons. As the race grew heated, online blogs began dredging up past news articles about Calvin Fayard, including a 2006 Vanity Fair piece where he is seen wearing a suit and holding a shotgun outside his mansion on St. Charles Avenue.

Fayard's campaign later ran an ad that tried to tie Campbell to David Duke, a white supremacist and former KKK leader who had entered the Senate race as a Republican.

Of course we aren't sure which "online blogs" are referred to here. We do have the Vanity Fair reference as a marker, though, which leads us to this AZ post dated October 28.  If Fayard's "early October" ad accusing the Campbell campaign of attacking her family was a reference to that post, the chronology is... well... challenging.

Further in that vein we find this text in the post itself.

Still....I had nothing to say.

Now...well...now...her campaign went and did this absurd, tasteless bullshit:

Caroline Fayard chooses to continue running David Duke-themed anti-Foster Campbell ad, loses Alliance for Good Government endorsement

After she accused Campbell's campaign of being focused on attacking her family

So there's Jason writing in the post where the Vanity Fair article appears about how the "attacking her family" controversy had already happened by this point.  More importantly, notice Jason's motivation for saying anything at all begins with Fayard's disgusting David Duke ad.  The Times-Pic article asserts that this attack ran "later" than any of this.  So, you know, nice job cracking that nut.

Thanks to the T-P's obsession with the "online blogs" (especially Jason's) we're no nearer to understanding what the Fayards are so upset about.   Did the Fayard camp point the reporter toward AZ? They're not the sort of people who see enemies arrayed against them in every direction... oh wait..  of course, they are probably that sort. In any case, the Fayards are petty bullies.

It's a shame the reporters get so distracted. I "dredged up" some articles about the Fayards and posted them my own self on election day.  That, of course, also had fuckall to do with Campbell's campaign.
People use the internet to talk to their friends, neighbors, and anybody else who might be interested about politics and the things they know about it. That's pretty dang healthy for democracy, right?

Not in the minds of these reporters and campaign operatives, apparently.  They have it in their heads that they're the only people with any interest in the elections in the first place. The arrogance and cynicism at work in the worlds of career PR people (whether they work for campaigns or for newspapers) is a disturbing obstruction to civic participation.  They just can't conceive of a universe where citizens have ideas and information to share with one another if they aren't being paid to do so. It's as if we aren't supposed to involve ourselves in the decisions that directly affect our lives.. such as, you know, these elections in which we are asked to vote.

If they are going to take that attitude, if they are going to make up some bullshit about a blogger being responsible for the ugliness of a campaign where one of the candidates blatantly lied her ass off about the other and then demanded that he apologize to her,  the least we can ask is that they get the chronology right.