07/23/08 "The United States made a major mistake by invading Afghanistan, failing to work with the Taliban to improve to life of its citizens."

More Lee Whitnum lunacy - Foreign policy edition

It's hard to keep up with all the nuttery that comes out of Lee Whitnum's mouth. I'd just written a column about her that was published in the Greenwich Time/Stamford Advocate today and then I read the article about her in today's Connecticut Post. There, Lee offers her usual rants about how immigrants ruined her life etc, etc, and then moved on to this astonishing piece of foreign policy "wisdom":

"The United States made a major mistake by invading Afghanistan, failing to work with the Taliban to improve to life of its citizens."

Say what?! If she'd said we'd made a major mistake by invading Iraq, I might have actually found myself agreeing with her for once. But it's the second part of her sentence that had me laughing out loud until I remembered that this person was actually attempting to run for Congress. Cause I'd have loved to see Lee Whitnum sashaying up to the Taliban with her unique set of people skills and telling them how to improve the life of the citizens of Afghanistan. Particularly the women. That's if they didn't stone her to death for not wearing a burqua first.

As I said in my post on CT Local Politics, Lee Whitnum is proof that the truth is WAY stranger than fiction.

Meanwhile, here's today's GT/Advocate column:

I don't respect those who complain about what is happening in the country yet make no effort to get involved in order to change it. When so many are apathetic about the political process, I have to hand it to Lee Whitnum, a woman who has such a fervent belief in causes such as the need to restrict the availability of H1-B visas that she is willing to attempt a run for Congress. On some level one has to admire her dogged tenacity: When having failed to muster a single delegate at the Democratic convention for the Fourth Congressional District, she managed to round up the requisite 2,459 signatures, or two percent of the registered party members in the district, to force a primary against the Democratic nominee, Jim Himes.

But that's where any respect I might have for Ms. Whitnum ends. Whereas Mr. Himes worked hard to raise grassroots support, gaining the attention of the national Democratic Party and Time Magazine, who rated his race against Chris Shays one of the top 15 races in the country to watch, not to mention raising over $2 million in campaign contributions, his putative opponent seems to be working hard to alienate as many people as possible.

I planned to ignore Ms. Whitnum until I received her recent press release about Mr. Himes' trip to Israel. At that point I knew I could no longer remain silent.

Readers of this column will know that I have never supported the war in Iraq. I am about as far from a NeoCon as you could possibly find. Friends of mine will know that I've had my disagreements with AIPAC. But I know that Israel is the one true democracy in the Middle East, and is our greatest ally there.

So it incensed me to read the following drivel from Ms. Whitnum's campaign:

"(Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon walked into the Vatican of mosques and declared 'I am a Jew I am here to pray' for the sole purpose of inciting a riot. He did it to get himself elected prime minister. His action marked the beginning of an eight-year wave of violence. A wave of violence that resulted in our own 9-11 losses."

First of all, Sharon didn't go to into the Dome of the Rock mosque, he went to the Temple Mount, what Ms. Whitnum might call "the Vatican of Jewish temples" located nearby. Secondly, to say that this action caused 9-11 is outrageous hate speak. Being outrageous is nothing new to Lee Whitnum, who first gained notoriety when she exploited her brief relationship with U.S. Sen. John Kerry to promote her self-published book "Hedge Fund Mistress." A police officer was on hand when she accosted noted Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz at Temple Sholom in May. She has conducted a vitriolic war of words in the blogosphere, a real lesson in how not to win friends and influence people.

Despite Ms. Whitnum's persistent attempts to paint Mr. Himes as an out-of touch Wall Streeter, it hasn't worked, because it's not the truth. He was raised middle class by a single mother and his campaign fundraising shows his grassroots appeal: 68 percent of his contributions in the second quarter were $100 or less.

Ms. Whitnum hasn't filed her mandatory FEC report, alternatively claiming "lack of campaign apparatus" and that she "intentionally withheld her reports because she didn't want to fuel Internet blogs that have questioned her candidacy," according to reports in this paper. I don't envy Mr. Himes this debate, but letting the primary voters hear Lee Whitnum speak will be his surest path to victory.



I've already had one e-mail from a reader saying: I have paid relatively little attention to Ms. Whitnum whom I have thought was a sideshow. I now know that even if she is a sideshow, she is a dangerous sideshow. I had no idea she held such insidious views. Thank you for enlightening me!

I consider alerting the general public to Ms. Whitnum's extreme views a matter of public service.