As if it wasn't bad enough that we had to endure the most dishonest campaign in Wisconsin history, we now have to endure an absurd re-retelling of the campaign via Christian Scheider's latest yarn over at WPRI.
Schneider not only re-tells Johnson's absurd claims (such as that he "misspoke" when talking about licensing guns), but does one better and makes up all kind of stuff to spice up the story.
Here's the first knee slapper, where Schneider claims that the noble hero Johnson has spent all of his money on the campaign:
In fact, Johnson was worth almost exactly what he said he would spend – around $15 million. When asked by Washington Post columnist George F. Will how much of his personal wealth he would use on the campaign, he said “all of it.”
The suggestion that Johnson spent all of his (err...his wife's ) fortune on the campaign is completly absurd: trust me, Johnson is still a millionaire in very, very good standing.
Then Scheider really goes for the fiction gold and says:
A millionaire challenger is actually something Feingold clearly dreaded. Part of the famous McCain-Feingold campaign law was a provision that prevented independently wealthy candidates from spending their own money on their campaign. This so-called “millionaire’s amendment” was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.
Feingold likely knew that the only way a challenger could catch up with his $5 million warchest was for a millionaire to spend his or her own money. So he authored a law to keep them from taking him on. But now, thanks to the law being declared unconstitutional, Feingold had a capable millionaire on his doorstep.
Pfffft. Ummm... putting aside that Feingold's last two opponents were self-funded millionaires, the "millionaire's amendment" did nothing to prevent a candidate such as Johnson from spending however much he wanted on his own campaign. All that provision of McCain-Feingold sought to do was enable the opponent of a millionaire to keep pace by loosening some of the restrictions of their fundraising.
All of this absurd nonsense was just in part one of a five part series. I'm not really of a fan of political fiction, so I stopped reading after part one.