Breitbart's Big Government Botches Peter Kinder Defense

As noted by many on Twitter yesterday, you know things are bad for Republican Lt. Governor Peter Kinder when his main media strategy seems to be leaking stories to his buddy Andrew Breitbart's blogs. Unsurprisingly, the stories on Brietbart's sites are full of speculation, unsupported assertions, and outright falsehoods.

One story on Big Government by Michelle Moore said the following:

Frankly, I find no evidence what-so-ever that he was a repeat visitor to said strip club OR that he had any interest in her at all. Pathetic.

That's some incisive reasoning, except for the tiny problem that Peter Kinder admitted to multiple media outlets that he visited the strip club "around 10 times:"

We were having a beer and the girls come by and chat. And you meet various of them, and that's where I met Tammy," Kinder said. "That much is true. Subsequently, I returned on a handful of occasions."

A "handful" was about 10 times, Kinder said. He compared his fondness to Chapman to a line in a Dean Martin song, "Let's Be Friendly."

A different post on Big Government suggests that either Chapman or her friend, John Ross, emailed the pictures to the Riverfront Times:

Over three years later, Kinder innocently enters a restaurant where Chapman was working, she asked him for a photo with her – hardly a thing a woman does with a man she accuses of being overly sexually aggressive with her in the first place – then she either sent the photo to Ross, or the Riverfront Times directly for publication, purely as a rationale for raising a 16 year-old smear with nothing to it.

This is false. The RFT noted that the original photo was not from Chapman, and said the following about Ross

We can also say that Ross is not the person who supplied us with the photo.

Finally, Big Goverment claims repeatedly that Ross worked for the Riverfront Times without offering any evidence for the claim:

The story breaks at the River Front Times, where John Ross occasionally writes and also posts several comments on the actual stories.

In fact, the RFT denies that he ever worked for them or wrote for them:

Here at Riverfront Times, we're baffled as to how Kinder came up with this theory. For starters, Ross has never worked or written for our publication. We can also say that Ross is not the person who supplied us with the photo.

Reached by phone today, Ross can't explain Kinder's conspiracy, either. Not only has he never written for the RFT, he says our publication tried to write a "hit piece" about him in 1998. He also says that he never saw the photo of Kinder and Chapman before its publication on the Riverfront Times'' website -- and advised Chapman against talking to the media after the picture went public.

In addition to outright falsehoods, the Big Goverment posts are chalk full of claims that are supported by no evidence. For example, they claim (as does Kinder) that "Democratic operatives" tried to push a similar story in 2008:

...one year later, in 2008, during Kinder’s Lieutenant Governor campaign, Democrats start carrying posters w/ pics of Chapman saying “Who is this woman?” at events including speaking events in Missouri.

However, they offer no evidence to support that claim, other than a link to a picture on Ross's website that they say was used in the campaign. Shouldn't they at least provide some shred of evidence to support a claim like this?

They further imply that Ross is a Democratic operative trying to sabotage Kinder to help Jay Nixon. However, Ross is a huge gun advocate who wrote a book based on the idea that the government would take away people's arms and the people who have to rise up in response. In fact, he told the RFT the following:

"One of the biggest efforts of my life was an eleven year effort to get conceal/carry passed in Missouri," says Ross. "I hired the original lobbyist for the bill out of my own pocket. For ten years, Peter Kinder supported us in our efforts. And for ten years, [then-Attorney General] Jay Nixon tried to block us. He was an opponent. I tell everyone who comes to my shooting school that. I tell them, if it comes down to voting for Kinder or voting for Nixon, I tell them to remember who's in favor of their right to self-defense."

It seems pretty likely to me that the reason Kinder is sending this stuff to Breitbart's sites is because no self-respecting operation would be willing to publish the junk.