Francine Busby’s 2006 campaign for Congress is a totally different creature than her bid in 2004. Then, she was a longshot liberal running against a popular incumbent. Now, she’s the Democrat poster child for ethics reform and moderation.
But while Busby (pictured to the right) needs to tell voters she’s a moderate in order to win a congressional district that President Bush carried by 11 points in 2004, moderation is hardly a Busby trait. Her public persona is a long record of radical leftism that the mainstream media is loathe to report. Busby has established ties not only to the fringe left of the Democrat party, but to groups and organizations whose positions on moral equivalence between terrorism and war would make even the dedicated liberals in her own party wrap themselves in the flag.
On her 2004 campaign website biography, Busby lists two groups with which she "actively participated," that are mysteriously missing from her 2006 biography.
Both of the groups, the Institute for Peace and Justice and the Sierra Club, are radical. One, the Institute for Peace and Justice, is a fringe group whose leader preached moral equivalence between the attacks of September 11th and the American response in Afghanistan.
Just two weeks after 9/11, the executive director of the Institute for Peace and Justice, Dr. Joyce Neu, wrote in the SD Union Tribune: “If we believe, like the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, that our cause is just, and that innocent lives may have to be lost to extract ‘justice’, then we become moral cowards, defining justice in terms of retribution and revenge and we perpetuate a cycle of violence all too familiar to those who perpetrated the brutal actions of 9/11.” Busby also took $400 in campaign contributions from Institute employees in the 2004 campaign.
This is a position far left of anything that even Barbara Boxer would take.
But Busby’s apparent endorsement of moral equivalence goes even further. While a lecturer at California State University San Marcos, Busby scheduled a guest speaker, Anne Hoiberg, who in 2003 told a Unitarian church “the major human rights violation involving Afghanistan right now is being committed by the U.S., which is holding 60 captured Afghans at the Guantanamo base in Cuba…"
Francine Busby goes out of her way to call herself a "moderate" on her campaign website. But what we see from her previous campaign, the groups she participates in, and from her past as a "women’s studies" teacher at Cal State is not the likes of a moderate, but of a feminist radical.
Moderate candidates don’t take money and support from radical groups like Moveon.org, Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, or actively participate in groups that preach moral equivalence. Radicals do.
Busby versus Bilbray
I have written quite a bit on this site about Brian Bilbray (pictured to the left). I have made it pretty clear that I wish that our GOP candidate going up against Francine Busby was more conservative on both social and fiscal issues. That having been said, Francine Busby has guaranteed that this is STILL A CONTRAST CAMPAIGN. Because as far to the political center as Bilbray is, Busby is even further out there on the radical extreme left. The choice between these two candidates isn’t difficult to make. If you need a little added incentive, just imagine San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House!
Bilbray versus Hauf
There is an entirely separate election taking place on the same ballot this June — the regular GOP primary for the full two year term (Bilbray and Busby are in a run-off to see who will serve the final six months of Duke Cunningham’s unexpired term). In this race, Bilbray has to demonstrate to Republican voters why he should get their votes. It is here where GOPers have a choice not between oatmeal and acid, as they do in the run-off. So, the challenge to Brian Bilbray is to make his case to Republican voters as to why he should have their support — and speaking for myself, how about doing it without wrapping himself in the immigration issue which, while it is important, is not a differentiating one between himself and conservative Republican businessman Bill Hauf (pictured to the right) who is running a spirited campaign, promoting a conservative platform.
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