Steelman Puts Genuine Nut on Campaign Payroll
Maybe Sarah Steelman thinks the best way to learn to communicate with the press corps is by taking pointers from a genuine conspiracy maniac. An entry on Team Steelman's first quarter report to the Missouri Ethics Commission shows a payment of $393.66 for "Media Training" to Jack Cashill, a "journalist" who runs Ingram's Magazine out of Kansas City.
To understate matters, Cashill has some, um, interesting world views. Various Cashill works include:
* a book that claims TWA Flight 800 crashed not as a result of mechanical failure as the National Transportation Safety Board concluded, but rather because it was shot down by a Navy missile intended for a terrorist plane that was on a collision course with the commercial airliner. Wacky!
* another book which posits that the plane crash which killed Clinton administration Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was not an accident, but was engineered as some kind of cover-up by Clinton allies. Very sensible.
* a documentary whose primary premise is evolution denial and character assassination of a long-dead Charles Darwin. Science, what science?
*a World Nut Daily article in which he makes the case against women working by claiming that all the extra driving to work puts an unnecessary "strain on the ecosystem" and contributes to the "meltdown" of the highway system. Of course.
* a column of stunning prescience which Cashill leads with this confident prognostication:
"Barring the calamitous, former United States senator from Tennessee Fred Thompson will be the next president of the United States."
Anyone willing to brave the World Net Daily archives can find much, much more that equals (or even surpasses) the level of insanity demonstrated above. I wouldn't recommend it.
Yet this Cashill is a person whom Sarah Steelman --a statewide elected official who wants to be governor-- sees fit to take advice from on how to communicate with the media. What does that say about her judgment? Does she share Cashill's belief that Bill Clinton murdered Ron Brown, that the Navy shot down Flight 800, or that evolution is a hoax?
Perhaps Cashill can give her some advice on how to answer those questions.
