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Pasco County News | Breaking News

Hackery abloom in Sager-Nugent contest

Posted Aug 23, 2010 by Tom Jackson

Updated Aug 24, 2010 at 09:53 AM

Political hackery, cultivated by a Spring Hill businessman and blogger, is in full bloom in the final hours before Republican voters in Florida’s 5th Congressional District render their verdict in the race to succeed Ginny Brown-Waite, the ailing 4-term congresswoman.

In his Hernando Insider post “A Hypocrite and a Patriotic Religious Scoundrel,” Jaz Zydenbos, a jack of assorted trades and a favorite of the developer class (not that there’s anything wrong with that), stretches certain truths and simply invents others in a final-weekend dissection of Jason Sager’s insurgent candidacy against Hernando County Sheriff Richard Nugent, GBW’s personally anointed successor and the GOP establishment’s paid favorite.

What Zydenbos scrupulously avoids is what may be Sager’s best claim on voters’ sympathies: That Nugent conspired with Brown-Waite to perform a nefarious switcheroo at the qualifying deadline, paving the way for potential personal gain for the sheriff while locking out other viable GOP rivals. Tuesday night, we shall discover how the GBW-Nugent two-step played in a year in which voters say they’ve had it with politics as usual.

Meanwhile, in attacking Sager – whose flaws are manifest, but are not exactly what the writer suggests – Zydenbos indulges silliness wrapped in hyperbole. For instance, he nonsensically suggests opportunism prompted Sager’s entry into the race: “The Tea Party was starting to bubble and Ginny Brown-Waite was becoming stale.” [Emphasis added.]

This is absurd on its face. When Sager declared his intentions last fall, it was a quintessentially quixotic act – a message candidacy for turbulent times that would, at its most effective, force GBW to tack to the right.

The only alternative is to concede that Sager, an utter political neophyte, possessed better instincts than every established and ambitious Republican on Florida’s Nature Coast. If Sager’s candidacy was prompted by an awareness that GBW was fast approaching her sell-by date, it was a condition apparent only to him. In that case, his shrewdness and insight are to be admired.

Zybendos also beats him up for making claims that exceed his resume, that he is an “audiovisual engineer” and a “constitutional scholar.” In fact, Sager has been a technician and seems to be an ardent student of the constitution, but the misapplications of these ambiguities have been amplified by sloppiness in the local media (present company included).

But Zybendos’ other characterizations are ludicrous. He describes two loosely organized, freelance conservative political groups – Protest Warriors and Communists for Kerry – from the Aughts Decade as “racist right wing extremist[s]” as well as “anti-establishment and hateful.”

If anything, both outfits demonstrated the absurdity of the anti-war, pro-Kerry left by indulging in absurdity themselves. Who was indicted by the eagerness of young members of the Democratic National Committee to pose for photos with Sager-as-Guervara?

As for their willingness to be anti-establishment, given the debt-deepening, liberty-curtailing and future-threatening events wrought by the establishment in the last 18 months, the thoughtfulness of their positions speaks for itself.

And until someone can put one of the (poorly conceived) pro-vouchers or anti-reparations signs into Sager’s hands, he is no more responsible for their allegedly racist (upon further review: not so much) messages than all Christians are for abortion-mill bombers, or even – as famously and persistently preached to us by no less than President George W. Bush – all Muslims are for the extremists who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11.

Then, donning his psychologist’s cap – we are uncertain about his degrees in the field – Zybendos hauls out his broad brush to dismiss Sager’s supporters as other than “thinking and fair-minded,” while condemning the candidate’s eagerness to quote the founders and scripture.

Both fountains of wisdom and faith are also the two most important refuges for a scoundrel such as Sager. Who dares to criticize? After all, that would be heresy.

Thus does Zybendos appoint himself (on flimsy authority) who is fit to wield such quotations. A few paragraphs later, he once again goes after Sager and his supporters, dismissing the former as self-interested and the latter as – well, you figure it out.

A hypocrite grandiose, Sager has born enormous time and money pressure to enrich himself politically and financially while using the name of God and the genius of the words from our founding fathers. Two years of unemployment have helped Sager to develop a well-honed act, but it rings thin to thinkers.

Zybendos urges Sager to rip off his mask; his own slips in the process:

Let’s get Rich Nugent to the general election, and let’s help change the direction of this country and rid ourselves of political and religious cons. Your vote means everything. Get off the couch, take time away from your job and life and vote your future. Don’t let this jerk steal the primary with his group of glassy eyed zealots.

How can anyone call out political cons without at least mentioning the odious maneuvering that got Nugent in the race – one he’d not otherwise have considered in a lifetime of back porch musing – in the first place?

Never mind that, if elected, Sager would be one of 435, his worst impulses reined in by leadership among House veterans. But whatever else voters might think of him, he would be a voice, and a vote, for government modesty and constitutional restraint. Meanwhile, Nugent panders, vowing to restore cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, but offering no suggestions about how to achieve, simultaneously, raises all around and fiscal sustainability of an entitlement barreling toward bankruptcy.

Zybendos engages exactly none of this. Instead, he has published a ginned up character assassination that has nothing to do with the merits of Sager’s positions on the issues in an effort to boost the candidacy of the establishment pick.

There’s a term for this, and that term would be: Politics as usual.