Factcheck.org Calls Bull On Lugar's False Attacks Against Mourdock

The Indiana news media is in the tank with Sen. Richard Lugar's re-election campaign so it is giving him a pass to run one false attack ad after another lying to Indiana voters about the record of his opponent, Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. The liberal Factcheck.org, however, is not giving Lugar a pass on his false attack ads. Here's a synopsis of what the organization found:

The Republican primary for Sen. Richard Lugar’s seat is apparently too close for comfort. Both Lugar’s campaign and the American Action Network are airing misleading attack ads against Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, the senator’s challenger for the nomination. The ads strain the facts to make Mourdock look like a tax cheat who makes bad investments and does not show up for work.

• The AAN ad claims that “Hoosier pensions and other funds lost millions” because of Mourdock’s “big bet on junk bonds.” That’s an exaggeration. It’s true that three state funds that purchased Chrysler debt in 2008 lost money when that company went through bankruptcy in 2009. But Mourdock didn’t oversee the investments of the Indiana Teacher’s Retirement Fund, which is the only one that actually lost “millions.”
• Ads from both the AAN and the Lugar campaign fault Mourdock for receiving an illegal second homestead deduction on a condominium he purchased in 2006. But the previous owner of the property, not Mourdock, applied for the deduction. Mourdock claimed that he notified the county auditor’s office of the illegal deduction in 2007. And the county auditor’s office has actually said that it erred in not removing the credit.
• The AAN ad also says that Mourdock has “skipped 66 percent of his official board meetings.” That’s true, according to an analysis done by Howey Politics Indiana. In his defense, Mourdock’s office says that the treasurer or his designee sits on 13 boards and commissions, and that Mourdock is nearly always represented by a senior staff member when he doesn’t attend meetings personally.

It is simply beyond the pale how biased the Indiana media has been in its coverage of this Senate primary race. The media has been reporting about a made up scandal claiming that Mourdock's Senate campaign is under investigation for allegedly trying to hack into the state Republican Party's e-mail database. The story is patently false. In fact, Sen. Lugar's campaign has been granted full access to use the system for the past year as every person in the database can tell you because of the number of e-mail communications with which they've been inundated by the Lugar campaign, even folks who've never contributed, supported or otherwise consented to be placed on the campaign's e-mail distribution list. A supporter of Lugar spread the false allegations to the Indiana news media, which ran with the made up controversy, to make it appear that the Mourdock campaign had engaged in some nefarious activity despite the total lack of evidence that anything of the sort had occurred.

The fact is that you simply cannot believe anything the mainstream political reporters are reporting on this Senate race. They are in bed with Lugar's re-election, and they will lie and distort everything associated with this campaign to besmirch Mourdock in their orchestrated effort to re-elect the out-of-touch Lugar, who has demonstrated throughout his political career that there is no unethical conduct he is not willing to engage in order to get what he wants. The same media that ran with this bogus computer hacking story won't even report on the fact that Lugar potentially committed multiple federal felonies by illegally billing taxpayers for his return trips to Indiana. The Democrats in the U.S. Senate will promptly announce the appointment of a special investigator to look into Lugar's illegal conduct if he wins re-nomination so that an otherwise safe Republican Senate seat can be handed to a Democratic candidate by default precisely the way the late Sen. Ted Stevens' seat was handed to a Democrat during the 2008 election.