Willing to say anything to get elected.

Well, I guess if you are behind in the polls, the Big Lie is in order. At least that seems to be the case for our Congressman, Rick Renzi, who was four points down to Ellen Simon in a recent poll.

Renzi is running an ad in which he says that "Simon was the President of the ACLU, an organization which defends the North American Man-Boy Love Association."

Well, at lest the second half of that is right. Sort of. The implication of course is that the ACLU supports the rights of the pedophiles to destroy children, when in fact the ACLU in their press release on the decision of their Massachusetts affiliate to represent members of NAMBLA in court says,

"In representing NAMBLA today, our Massachusetts affiliate does not advocate sexual relationships between adults and children.

What the ACLU does advocate is robust freedom of speech for everyone. The lawsuit involved here, were it to succeed, would strike at the heart of freedom of speech."

However these kinds of distortions are everywhere in political ads these days. However, the first half of Mr. Renzi's statement, saying that Ellen Simon was the President of the ACLU is flat out and demonstrably wrong. The President of the ACLU since 1991 has been Nadine Strossen (Incidentally, she is the first woman to ever head the organization). Strossen succeeded Norman Dorsen, who served as the President of the ACLU from 1976-1990. So the contention that Ellen Simon was 'the President of the ACLU' is a flat out, bald faced lie, and a very easy one to prove false with a few minutes and a search engine. She was involved with the ACLU in Ohio, being the President of their Cleveland affiliate, but of course an ACLU member in Ohio could not have been responsible for a decision made by a Massachusetts affiliate, so in order to complete his chain of spurious logic trying to paint her as a defender of pedophiles, he had to invent a new resume for her (which is interesting-- if she lied on her resume, it would be a major scandal. But if he lies on her resume, it's just politics as usual.) But if Rick Renzi is so concerned about defending pedophiles, I would only ask him whether he plans to vote for Dennis Hastert as speaker of the house, since the revelation that Congressman Reynolds told the speaker there might be a problem involving Mark Foley but Hastert chose to ignore it instead of dealing with it then.

Not that this is anything new for Renzi, either. In the 2002 campaign he ran ads claiming that George Cordova embezzled money from a business he was a partner in and then wired it out of the country to an uncle in Mexico. Of course if this were true then Cordova would have gone to prison for a long, long time. But he not only did not go to prison or have any charges filed against him, but he sued Renzi after that election for libel and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of cash. You figure it out.

Heck, it isn't even the first big lie that Renzi has told this year. Earlier this year he claimed that he had been endorsed by former Navajo Nation President Albert Hale. Only it wasn't true. Hale, irked at the fake endorsement, publically asked Renzi for an apology and to retract the endorsement. Far from an apology, Renzi's response was to personally attack Hale and call him a 'convicted felon' (also a big lie). Hale, who had planned to pretty much sit this election out, immediately endorsed Ellen Simon.

One has to wonder why people keep voting for a guy who has now proven over and over and over again that he is willing to outright lie in order to get elected.