Beckwith's follies

Remember David Beckwith, the campaign consultant for "Big John" Cornyn? Apparently, he's been a busy boy at the Burnt Orange Report.

When a staffer for Lt. Col. Noriega made a dumb mistake and falsely represented himself as a blogger to the Cornyn campaign, he was rightfully excoriated. When a Democratic consultant created an anonymous website, he was rightfully questioned. In 2007, user Buck Smith began posting on this and other sites, mainly on threads involving Lt. Col. Rick Noriega or Sen. John Cornyn. He attacked diarists and commenters and provided pro-Cornyn spin on many items. In the interest of full disclosure, and in order to keep everything fair, and since Buck Smith has not disclosed who he is, we thought we would clue you in that he is David Beckwith, John Cornyn's senior staffer.

We found out his identity because Mr. Beckwith's email on file with the site is the same email listed on the webpage for his high school reunion class. (We also have a screenshot in case the site is removed soon.)

You know who we are and who we work for. You know who the Democratic consultants and staffers that comment on the site are, and who they work for. Now you know who is the Republican operative, and who he works for. Keep that in mind every time he leaves comments attacking you for supporting Lt. Col. Rick Noriega. Keep that in mind every time he takes to the site to spin for Senator John Cornyn. Keep that in mind when you realize that all of the staffers for Lt. Col. Rick Noriega have disclosed their day jobs, while Senator Cornyn's staffer lurk in the shadows, using age old dirty whisper campaigns in an online forum.

In fact, Cornyn's own staffers commented directly on this issue:

"If you're going to misrepresent yourself, be aware of caller i.d." Walsh said. "I don't think misrepresenting yourself is in line with Texas values. I just find it somewhat ham-handed."

Interestingly, it was Buck Smith who kicked the story off online on an unrelated BOR post. Beckwith linked to no outside material but did get the ball rolling using his deceptive user name with this comment.

After the Cornyn campaign gave an amazingly juvenile response to BOR's request for a comment about this, Beckwith admitted thr truth to the Chron's Peggy Fikac. As noted in the comments on the BOR post, Beckwith/Buck Smith even commented on the earlier post about his rumored firing. That would be the definition of sock puppetry right there. Way to go, dude.

On a much nicer note, Rick Noriega is the latest addition to MyDD's Road to 60 group. Since I posted yesterday, Noriega has gone well past 10,000 contributors and $900,000 on ActBlue - by my rough calculation, he's raised over $40K on ActBlue since yesterday. Not too bad. And you can move him farther along for the quarter if you hit the link before midnight tonight. Go ahead, do it for Buck Smith.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on June 30, 2008 to Election 2008