Vincent Carroll doesn't name the ideology Tim Gill and Pat Stryker are pushing -- though we know it is redefining marriage -- but Carroll does point out that Gill and Stryker have a long record of supporting political outfits that specialize in "character assasination":
[Pat Stryker is] still happily sends big checks to groups whose abiding purpose is to smear men and women running for office with outrageous accusations largely unrelated to reality.
She has done this for a number of years without any apparent second thoughts, so why should this election be different?
Americans say they're disgusted by over-the-top political ads, but that's hard to believe. Otherwise the perpetrators' reputations would pay a price. Yet they rarely do.
Stryker is a respected member of the civic establishment in northern Colorado. No one in her social circles would probably dream of calling her out for contributing to the debasement of political discourse — any more than anyone similarly situated in metro Denver would call out Tim Gill, another of Colorado's richest citizens associated with the same ultra-attack outfits.
The single sleaziest political mailer sent to voters in both 2008 and 2010 in Colorado — and several of the sleaziest in 2006 — was produced by groups financed in part by Stryker and Gill.
The one in 2008 falsely claimed a judge had found that a Republican candidate for the state House "posed a threat and imminent danger" to an unnamed "victim." The 2010 mailer was if anything wilder, claiming that an aspiring Republican House candidate "wants to bring all of America's nuclear waste to Colorado" in a scheme so reckless it could blow the state "off the map."
... Meanwhile, mailers against state Rep. Ken Summers, produced by the Stryker- and Gill-backed Coalition for Colorado's Future, portray him as someone with a soft spot for rapists and perpetrators of domestic violence.
Over the past five years, the second- and third-highest individual Colorado donors to political campaigns have been Gill and Stryker (Congressman Jared Polis is No. 1). And more power to them for commitment to their causes.
It's hard to get too starry eyed about this idealism, however, when year after year they consent to the tactics of the gutter.
