Anyone Can Just Make Shit Up

I made passing reference a couple of months ago to the dead rhino ad which, unfortunately, has since been removed from YouTube (though you can read about it here).  It was a plug for Andy Thomas and an attack on Tom Horne, his opponent in the Republican primary for Arizona Attorney General.  The point of the bizarre ad is that Horne is really a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and a closet liberal, which is preposterous, but it's what politicians do in campaigns.

And, of course, I've done plenty of sneering about Andy and his abuses of power as County Attorney in Maricopa.

So it's maybe time to point out that the alternative to Andy, this Tom Horne fellow.  He's Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and, apparently, wholly out of touch with reality.  We can thank the ever intrepid blogger Nick Martin at Heat City for the proof. 

Tom Horne, the head of Arizona’s public school system, drew huge applause from a crowd of tea partiers earlier this month when he said Israel’s war on terror proves that the U.S. needs to build a wall along the Mexican border.
“Israel totally put a stop to terrorism by building their wall,” said Horne, a Republican whose final term as school superintendent ends after this year and who is vying to become the state’s next attorney general.

Wait, you say, there are terrorist attacks all the time in Israel.  What's he talking about?

Ah, that's your mistake.  Horne knows better. As he told Nick,

It’s been all over the newspapers.

Oh, sure, the Israeli Security Agency publishes monthly reports on terrorists attacks.  But what do they know?

Asked which newspapers had reported it, Horne could not name one. When told, then, about the number of attacks in just those two months, he was momentarily speechless.

“How do they define a terrorist attack?” Horne said finally.

The education chief insisted he had made the same statement at numerous campaign events and no one questioned him about it before.

But instead of changing his mind after hearing the facts, Horne stuck to his story. He said he remained certain of his claim’s accuracy despite what the Israeli government reported.

“I’ll stand by it,” he said. “I’m talking about something that there is pretty common knowledge about.”

Of course, Horne also believes that 2 + 2 = 47, that the moon is made of cheese, and that the earth is flat.  (Not really, he knows that 2 + 2 = 11.  It's been in all the papers.)

Harvard, no doubt, is proud.  

For those who are wondering, Horne received his law degree from Harvard before Elena Kagan became Dean.