More Scott Maddox bashing

I didn't use to hate Scott Maddox, and in truth, I'm not sure I'd characterize my attitude toward as hatred. But he does some to be... an idiot. At the very least.

Some of the party faithful are losing faith in Maddox, and I suspect it’s going to be his downfall. In just the week since he officially joined the campaign for governor, he’s had nothing but bad press.

Last week, he was criticized for acting as an unregistered lobbyist for a developer in Leon County while serving as Democratic Party chairman, lobbying for a development reviled by environmental advocates who’ll play a major role in the upcoming primary.

Then today news comes that in the last two weeks of his tenure as Democratic party chairman he gave a sweetheart contract to a friend of his for $100,000 worth of party planning services, without asking for bids.

The friend of his has been caught in a classic lie and, like so many people in public life, is incapable of recognizing when she’s full of shit. The company’s owner, Allie Merzer, sent an email to friends last week that has become public in which she said that her company is a “subsidiary” of a business owned by Maddox. Yesterday, after the email came to light, Merzer said that had been a bad choice of words and the two companies were independent.

Let’s be frank. Allie Merzer is a liar. Nobody says “subsidiary” when they mean “independent.” Nobody is that stupid, certainly not anybody capable of owning a subsidiary business and getting sweetheart deals from powerful friends. It takes some amount of guile to get a deal like Ms. Merzer did, and guile requires intelligence, and if you are even remotely intelligent you know damn well what the word “subsidiary” means, and it sure doesn’t mean independent.

Have you ever noticed how often this happens? An idiot says something he or she clearly meant to say, but three days later upon realizing people don’t like it the idiot claims he misspoke or his words were twisted. This is just plain lying, that’s all it is; I’d like to see more reporters say so.

So add to the unethical sweetheart deal the fact that Maddox is friends with a liar. (No surprise there; he is a politician.)

And now there are signs that Maddox abrogated almost all his duties in the last three months of his tenure as party chairman. In the first quarter of this year, when Maddox was thinking about running for governor, the party raised just a quarter of a million dollars, 1/12 of what the state GOP raised and the worst quarter in the last several years. When Maddox stepped down to make his vanity run for governor, he left his party with only $3,100 in the bank and over $12,000 in debts.

Of course Maddox’s biggest supporters all say he reinvigorated the party’s base and brought its fundraising apparatus back from the dead. But how can one of the two major parties in a state with 16 million people be called “reinvigorated” while almost nine grand in the hole?

It looks the Democrats are going to figure out that Scott Maddox is more concerned with Scott Maddox than anything else. Good for them.