quayle_debate


We here at PHXated celebrate polymorphous perversity as much as the next guy or gal, but we don’t see the sexual attraction of Ben Quayle.

He has his dad’s deer-in-the-headlights look. He’s spindly and nervous and dumb as a box of rocks.

And the single notable achievement in his life is writing for a porny web site.

We like our candidates to be up on the issues. We get turned on by the policy wonks.

A few years back, when the country was facing two mismanaged wars, trillions in debt, and a financial meltdown that threatened our way of life, Ben Quayle didn’t lend his voice to the debate.

Instead, he was on the hunt for foxy chicks for Dirty Scottsdale.

But for James King, one of the contributors to New Times' Valley Fever blog, Quayle is the boy-man of his dreams.

Here he is harping on Quayle’s opponent, Jon Hulburd, again for the crime of doing what any other candidate would do. i.e., pour some money in at the end of what’s turned out to be an unexpectedly close race.

Up to now, King’s been writing long posts trying to explain away Quayle’s lies about having worked for Dirty Scottsdale.

As we’ve said before, King’s a serious journalist and New Times is a serious place, but we think King’s being unacceptably partisan on this issue.

PHXated can see that Quayle is a dink and something of a creep, and finds his opponent, Jon Hulburd, to be a guy who’s very smart, up on the issues, and almost compulsively forthright. (He’s basing that contention on one interview and watching, over the weekend, Hulburd in action at a house party meet-and-greet.)

At the same time, we’ve attacked Hulburd’s crazy support for a continuation of the Bush tax cuts, among other things.

And I don’t want to get into the particulars, but we’ve also done something that had one of Hulburd’s top campaign people calling and screaming at us for days.

In other words, PHXated isn’t spinning for Hulburd.

King is definitely spinning for Quayle.

While getting granular in trying to defend Quayle’s handing of his Dirty Scottsdale scandal, King’s basically trying to make the point that Quayle successfully lied to reporters when they asked about his involvement, so it’s not fair either to a) attack him for the involvement or b) accuse him of lying.

That’s strikes us as a bit … extrajournalistic.

And it evades the point that Quayle was running around chasing chicas in Scottsdale when he could have been doing something a little more … public policy oriented.

And now King’s hammering on some lawsuits that were brought against Hulburd ten years ago. He published his first post on these mid-afternoon on Wednesday, Oct. 13… fortuitously timed for Ben Quayle to bring them up in a debate that started less than an hour later.

Another example: in writing about a recent Public Policy Polling poll of the district, King went out of his way to disparage PPP as a liberal outfit.

But in FiveThirtyEight.com’s rating of pollsters, Nate Silver puts PPP in the middle; in fact, the company gets much better scores than a lot of reputable outfits like CNN/Opinion Research, the LA Times/Bloomberg, and Gallup.

(The closeness of the Hulburd/Quayle race was a surprise, and it’s fair to question the findings in that one poll, as King also does; I’m just pointing out another instance where spin seems to be seeping in to King’s analysis as well. PHXated, by the by, went out of its way to note Silver’s skepticism of that particular poll.)

You can read all of PHXated’s Ben Quayle coverage here.