In depth look at Bill White's evil attempt to deny troops the right to vote...

Let me just say that if Rick and his peeps don't run a thousand points state wide on this issue in late September or early October, I march down to Rick's campaign head quarters and slap some peeps around. Consider yourselves warned... this is the easiest ad to make on the easiest universal issue I have maybe ever seen in a campaign in Texas.

Bill White fought with people who tried and thankfully failed to deny Texas troops the right to vote when they were engaged over seas in combat (link). Excerpt follows...

It looks like a 1997 voting rights controversy is coming back to haunt yet another Democrat – this time Bill White, who was party chairman at the time and is running for governor now. Gov. Rick Perry is blasting White for his role in an attempt to deny military voters the right to cast ballots in local elections.

In 1997, Texas Democrats filed an election contest seeking to overturn the results of two local elections in Val Verde County (Del Rio), claiming that soldiers stationed at Laughlin Air Force Base weren’t eligible voters. In two races, Val Verde County voters narrowly elected a Republican sheriff and county commissioner. Democrats argued that military voters could vote in federal elections but not local elections unless they had prior ties to the community.

To make matters worse, the election contest was initially filed by Texas Rural Legal Aid and paid for with tax dollars. After then-U.S. Sens. Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison and then-U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla objected, legal aid withdrew from the case and the election contest was funded privately.

Eventually, Texas courts ruled that the military votes were valid. The sheriff – D’Wayne Jernigan – and has served for more than a decade. During the election contest, it was discovered that the Republican candidate for county commissioner – Murry Kachel – had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and Kachel declined to take office.

Democrats responded by trying to disenfranchise military voters in local elections in the 1997 legislative session. Then-Rep. Hugo Berlanga (D-Corpus Christi) offered an amendment that made it much more difficult for military voters in local elections. The Berlanga amendment was backed by the vast majority of Democrats and was adopted over the strenuous objection of the senior Republican on the House Elections Committee at the time, Rep. Jerry Madden (R-Richardson). The bill to which the Berlanga amendment was attached died in the Senate. White was quoted in The Abilene Reporter-News defending the Berlanga amendment. (Click here to read).

Ever since that controversy, Republicans have been making the Democrats pay a hefty political price for trying to disenfranchise Texas soldiers. In fact, in 2004, former Rep. Paul Sadler (D-Henderson) was doing quite well in his campaign for an open seat for the Texas Senate – until Texans for Lawsuit Reform conducted a direct mail campaign blasting Sadler for voting for the Berlanga amendment. Then the Sadler campaign started sinking like a rock, and the seat is now held by the eventual victor, Sen. Kevin Eltife (R-Tyler).

So it’s no surprise that Gov. Rick Perry is making a campaign issue out of Bill White’s record on military voting rights. He was – after all – state Democratic party chairman when all this was occurring.

This is a no brainer, and if I had to guess Rick's peeps already have the ads basically cut and ready to go.

Scott O'Grady could be in them... photos of Bill White as the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party... footage from press conference... the story of how Bill White is unpatriotic and hates the troops... he tried to throw our troops under the bus for cheap political gain... troops are generally more Republican than Democrat and Bill White joined the lawsuit to deny those troops their votes... all because it would have helped one of their liberal candidates...

That makes me physically ill thinking that Bill White will get more than a fringe amount of the vote. This is even worse than being a 9/11 truther in my opinion.

Bill White thinks this is not going to hurt him... he sez that people threw that at him when he ran for mayor of Houston and he got away with it back then. He is about to learn the hard way the difference between small time Houston politics and Texas state wide politics.