Sweating Yet, Mikey?

This was the lede paragraph of the story that Mikey now has a 5-point lead over Patrick Murphy in the election for the 8th district U.S. Congressional seat, which is barely above the statistical margin for error (no link is available yet from the Bucks County Courier Times web site…let’s see if they put one up).

Update 9/22: Here's the link.

Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick’s lead over Democrat Patrick Murphy has shrunk to 5 percentage points, a 9-point jump for Murphy since March, according to a new poll paid for by Murphy’s political party.

This letter to the editor also appeared today in the Courier Times.

Labor Day has come and gone and along with that comes the onslaught of misleading political rants as the November elections approach. One particularly disturbing attack was a letter penned by Mr. Weinstein, which can only be construed as a pre-emptive strike against congressional candidate Patrick Murphy.

Weinstein has a right to his opinion, of course, but he distorted and skewed Murphy’s answer to a question on Israel.

A caller’s question during a recent congressional candidates’ radio debate was in reference to Israel’s right to stage a pre-emptive attack against Iran. Murphy was addressing that very term “pre-emptive.” Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick, however, twisted his own answer into a right of Israel to “defend itself” and dodged the issue of pre-emption entirely. There’s a huge difference between the two terms, and Fitzpatrick knows better.

He never was clear on the pre-emption issue.

No one would argue Israel’s right to defend itself, and Murphy has always been publicly and undeniably pro-Israel on that point. However, he stated that diplomacy is also critical, and he warned that pre-emptive attacks are not a first-resort answer to problems between countries.

Let’s not forget that the quagmire in Iraq was created in part by the pre-emptive actions of our own administration in response to faulty intelligence, ill-advised assessments, and a total miscalculation of the can of worms this war would pry open.

I would consider the careful assessment of an Iraq war veteran such as Patrick Murphy over the myopic view of the Bush administration any day.

And I hope that letters such as Mr. Weinstein’s are not going to be typical of partisan distortions in the days to come.

Sam Scalzo
Bristol, PA

That’s a nice wish, Mr. Scalzo, but unfortunately it has not come to pass (and I didn’t see the Weinstein letter – may have glanced at it but probably tuned it out since it was the usual inaccurate refrain against Patrick).

As noted in the upper right corner of this page, October 10th is the deadline for registration to vote in PA, so if you haven’t taken care of this yet, please do so soon (here’s more information).

And as always, to help Patrick, click here.