It’s Halloween, and in the Land of (Honest Abe) Lincoln a liberal judge is wearing a Republican mask and lying to voters.
Staring disaster in the face on Tuesday, Democrats are running scared. And some are even running as Republicans.
Thomas Kilbride is running to be “retained” as a State Supreme Court Justice in Illinois. He needs 60% of voters in the 3rd District, which comprises a band across the middle of Illinois from the Mississippi River to Indiana, to re-elect him.
Kilbride is a Democrat, according to Wikipedia’s State Supreme Court page for Illinois, and received $600,000 from the Democratic party in 2000 when he first ran. But Republicans and conservatives in his District will be forgiven for being confused about that, because they’ve recently been bombarded with campaign flyers indicating Kilbride is a Republican.
Here’s the front and back of that flyer, which Illinois Review originally posted.
Kilbride needs the conservatives in his district, who are already energized to vote against the Obama-Pelosi-Reid big-government agenda, to think he’s a Republican and therefore not vote him out of the Supreme Court. That’s why he puts a big fat Republican elephant on the front of his flyer, which is titled “Election Alert for Republicans.”
Thus, we discover just how desperate Democrats are to retain power this year.
Normally, we’d chalk that up to smart, albeit dirty, Illinois politics. But Kilbride has taken this a step further by telling voters he is a Republican, when he’s not. That’s fraud. Moreover, on the back side of the flyer proclaiming his conservative values, he uses “we” 9 times and “our values” 4 times, further cementing in voters’ minds that he is something he is not: a conservative Republican.
The only not-astonishing thing about this story is where Kilbride is getting all the money for this. Kilbride has raised $2.4 million to save his job from the standard liberal groups: “House Speaker Michael Madigan and organized labor,” says the Chicago Tribune.
Madigan, by the way, makes Nancy Pelosi look like a nursery rhyme when it comes to controlling the Illinois House. Speaker Madigan directed the Illinois Democratic Party to give Kilbride $1.42 million. The Illinois Federation of Teachers has pitched in with almost half a million bucks as well. Check out all of Kilbride’s 2010 donations here:
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Kilbride Contribution Analysis 2010
Why is Illinois’ version of Nancy Pelosi on steroids giving all this money to Kilbride?
The Chicago Tribune nails it:
“Why would Madigan put so much money in a judicial election when he’s also trying to save his members in the House? Precisely because he wants to save his members in the House — for the next decade. The legislature will soon draw new districts. The Supreme Court will rule on that map. In effect, the court will decide which party holds the upper hand in the House and Senate for the next 10 years. In 2001, Kilbride joined other Democrats on the court to uphold the map drawn by Democrats. Every Republican on the court voted against that map.”