August 7, 2005
Harris' colorful theories
Maybe Katherine Harris has been the object of so many conspiracy theories that she now believes she has to create her own.
Last year, at a rally for President Bush in her Gulf Coast congressional district, Rep. Harris told the audience that the Bush administration had prevented "more than 100" terrorist attacks against the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Harris learned this startling information, she said, from documents that were "classified... obviously not classified to me... but things I can't go into details about." Among those thwarted attacks, according to Rep. Harris, was an attempt to blow up the power grid of Carmel, Ind., an Indianapolis suburb of about 40,000. Carmel's mayor, Rep. Harris explained, had told her about a man "of Middle Eastern heritage" who had been found with explosives.
In fact, there had been no such plot. In fact, a spokesman said the mayor hadn't talked with Rep. Harris. "Maybe I said too much," said the woman who opens her Senate campaign this week.
The latest plot exposed by the vainglorious Rep. Harris concerns, appropriately, herself. Last week, she told an interviewer that newspapers had doctored photographs of her during the recount controversy. "Computer-enhanced" and "colorized" pictures exaggerated her makeup. It was "painful."
So which newspapers turned the former secretary of state into Cruella De Vil? She couldn't name one. Of course not. Normally, we'd ask Rep. Harris to put up or shut up, but maybe the fact that the state Republican Party tried to find a challenger will persuade her that sometimes it's better just to shut up.
Posted by Opinion staff at August 7, 2005 6:19 PMLet's face it, if you're Katherine Harris, after how new organizations misrepresented her handling of the 2000 election, you just might become a little paranoid. There is little doubt that news organizations found the most unflattering pictures of her to print, when they had a story, whether they hated her as much as Bush and did a little creative editing, to me is unlikely but not impossible to believe.
Whether the PB Post has to get involved in her comments is another thing. THe Post has been one news organization that has tried, in every way possible, to discredit the legitimacy of the 2000 election. Even after participating, with other news organizations in the 2001 recount, trying to find votes which just weren't there, you had to print articles that helped perpetuate the myth of the 2000 election. The bottom line, in the 2000 election, is that Al Gore could not have won Florida by any legal means and that is the one fact your newpaper has failed to print.
As far as Ms. Harris is concerned, if it were anyone else, this would be a non-story and certainly not one worthy of editorial comment.
Posted by: Jim Temple at August 8, 2005 10:08 PM
