Longshot GOP Candidate Becomes Fox Darling After 'BlahBlahBlahGate'
ERIC LACH – MAY 6, 2014, 6:00 AM EDT
It's a case of the candidate, the newspaper, and the blah, blah, blah.
A really, really longshot Republican Senate candidate in Oregon has parlayed his confrontation with Portland's Willamette Week newspaper into appearances on Fox News, where he has denounced the paper for enforcing a "totalitarian regime."
The incident with the newspaper occurred late last month. Willamette Week determines its political endorsements a little differently than other newspapers around the country. Instead of interviewing candidates individually, the paper brings candidates for each particular office in as a group to talk to its editors and reporters. On April 21, Mark Callahan -- a guy who has previously run for office as a Democrat and Pacific Green Party member, who has run for President, who now bills himself as "cut from the same cloth" as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and who has raised just $21,000 for his campaign -- joined a group of four other Republicans competing in the state's Senate primary for an endorsement interview with the newspaper. The whole thing stretched an hour and a half, but Callahan didn't make it to the end. He got in a fight with the Willamette Week's staff and was asked to leave.
"You want to talk about disrespect," Callahan said, a little over an hour into the interview, after spotting reporter Nigel Jaquiss scribbling in a notebook while another candidate, Joe Rae Perkins, gave an answer via a speakerphone. "I see what you’re writing down there. You just wrote down 'blah blah blah blah blah' for everything that Jo Rae said. Jo Rae is a respectable woman. Why are you not respecting her by writing 'blah blah blah blah blah' on your notepad?"
No one tried to deny that Jaquiss had in fact written "blah blah blah" in his notebook. The moderator tried to move things along by asking Callahan whether he believed climate change was a myth or reality.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mark-callahan-blahblahblahgate-willamete-week
