The Command Post
2004 US Presidential Election
October 24, 2004
| More Election Violence

Though it’s relatively low-level, so far.

From The Oregonian :

Someone smashed the windows of the Multnomah County Republican office in Southeast Portland on Thursday
[…]
Patrick Donaldson, volunteer chairman of the Bush campaign in Multnomah County, said the broken windows, discovered early in the morning, follow weeks of harassment, including threatening phone calls and people walking into the office and ripping up signs.

Any Bush supporter will tell you the various levels of disdain from co-workers and complete strangers when they assert they’re Republican, that level of disdain was nowhere near this in 2000,” Donaldson said. “I’m not saying we are without fault, but these efforts to try to intimidate us and frighten us . . . it really upsets me.

Oregon Democratic Party officials said they do not condone smashing the windows of Republican offices and discourage such acts.

But the fact is that the reason the Republican Party is feigning righteous indignation is because they don’t want to talk about the 30,000 jobs lost and the 180,000 Oregonians who have lost health care,” said Neel Pender, executive director of the state Democratic Party.

From the Arizona Sun-Daily :

Political motivations turned criminal Thursday night or early Friday when vandals smashed a large glass door with a section of cinder block at the Republican Party headquarters in downtown Flagstaff.

A pile of shattered glass joined egg shells filling the entryway to the GOP offices, located on Humphreys Street across from Wheeler Park. Fliers with information criticizing President Bush were staked up outside the door.
[…]
Local GOP coordinator John Echols said he received at 7 a.m. phone call from an employee at Enterprise Rent-a-Car next door reporting the vandalism. Echols arrived to find the smashed door, but little else in the way of damage. Still, police are considerting the crime as a felony because cost to replace the door is expected to exceed $1,000.

Thankfully, none of the office had been vandalized,” Echols said, but speculated that the vandals most likely intended to cause more damage. “I think they may have been spooked. We are on a major thoroughfare.

For Echols, it’s nothing new. In 2002, someone threw a rock through a window at the Republican headquarters, then located at the Bashas’ plaza at the north end of Humprheys Street.

I still have that rock from two years ago,” Echols said, pulling it out of the closest in his headquarters office.

Echols also reported that a number of Bush-Cheney supporters have had their signs torn down, and a few “have had swastikas painted on them.”

Officer David Holland, the responding officer, said that he logged several items into evidence for the investigation. Among those items were the cinder block, a “good” fingerprint card, signage stakes, beer bottles, a piece of paper with names on it, glass, a hubcap, and witness statements.

He also logged items of “anti-Bush literature,” he said.

Among the statements on the literature was, “We can’t get back the last four years. We can’t lose the next four.”



Posted by Alan Brain at October 24, 2004 03:10 AM | TrackBack
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