Louisiana Voice

A professional acquaintance told us several months ago that if David Vitter is elected governor, “I guarantee you he will go down in scandal in his first term.”

It may not take that long.

Vitter has used his Senate franking privilege to stick his sanctimonious foot in his mouth all the way up to his knee. Or, as my grandfather was fond of saying, he let his alligator mouth overload his jay bird backside.

On Friday (October 23, 2015), it was also learned that a man employed by a Dallas private investigation firm that has been paid more than $135,000 in 2015 by Vitter’s campaign was arrested after attempting to record a conversation between two Jefferson Parish politicians. The firm, J.W. Bearden & Associates, also has offices in New Orleans. http://theadvocate.com/news/police/13785472-32/man-arrested-after-trying-to

Robert Frenzel, 30, of Texas, was apparently video recording a conversation between Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand and State Sen. Danny Martiny during a regular breakfast meeting convened by Normand at the Royal Blend café in Old Metairie.

When confronted by Normand, Frenzel bolted from the restaurant. He was eventually found hiding behind an air-conditioning unit and booked on one count of criminal mischief but Normand said there also was probable cause to arrest him for interception of communications.

Vitter’s campaign office did not respond to repeated requests by Lamar White, publisher of the CenLamar web blog, for comment on Frenzel’s arrest. White’s phone calls and text messages to Vitter campaign spokesman Luke Bolar were not answered.

Normand, a longtime political enemy of Vitter, said he was unable to say for certain that he was a target of Frenzel’s surveillance, “but I’m going to find out.” He said he was confident in suggesting that Vitter was behind the surveillance. “Everybody does opposition research,” he told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “but quite frankly, I’m not the opposition.”

Normand said that investigators discovered a printout on blogger Jason Brad Berry. Over the past week, Berry has published a series of interviews on his blog www.theamerican zombie.com with former prostitutes who claim to have had sexual relations with Vitter, including one, Wendy Ellis, who says Vitter fathered a child with her in 2000.

While it’s commonplace for U.S. senators and representatives to use their free mailing perk (franking) to bolster their campaigns for re-election, it’s a bit tacky to do so in an effort to promote yourself to voters in a campaign for, say….governor.

And yet, that’s precisely what he has done. Apparently, it’s not enough to hit up state lobbyists in a blatant quid pro quo (kwid ˌprō ˈkwō/ noun: a favor or advantage granted or expected in return for something) solicitation of $5,000 contributions.

Also on Friday, one day before the gubernatorial primary election, we received a one-page, three-paragraph letter from Vitter on his U.S. Senate letterhead “to keep you informed on my work in the U.S. Senate to reduce wasteful spending in Washington.”

(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

After launching into a one-paragraph attack on President Obama for the $18 trillion national debt, Vitter launched into an invective against the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps.

“Nearly one in five people in America receive some amount of benefits from the program,” he wrote. “As it has expanded, fraud has also spread.”

Well yes, as any program involving the exchange of anything valuable expands, fraud expansion goes with it. That’s no great revelation. But let’s take a closer look. (We would emulate Bobby Jindal by prefacing this with his usual, “Two things,” but there are more than two points to be made here.)

• Louisiana accounted for $1.3 billion of the total of $70 billion in U.S. food stamp redemptions in Fiscal Year 2014, which was 1.85 percent of the national total.
• Louisiana had only 26 of the 2,226 sanctions imposed nationally in FY-2014, just 1.2 percent of the total sanctions.
• In 2014 more than $84 million in food stamp benefits were spent at military commissaries. Vitter purports to support the military but many members of our armed forces live at or below the poverty level. The USDA estimates that up to 22,000 active-duty members of the military used food stamps in 2012. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/military-families-turn-food-stamps
• More than 90 percent of entitlement benefits went to the elderly, the disabled or to working households. The breakdown is 53 percent to those 65 and older, 20 percent to the non-elderly disabled and 18 percent to non-elderly, non-disabled working households. SNAP STATISTICS

Vitter says in his letter than he has authored bills to require work requirements to be enforced. He apparently is oblivious or uncaring about the fact that some food stamp recipients are forced to work two and three minimum wage jobs just to survive. Yet Vitter is adamantly opposed to increasing the minimum wage.

Vitter apparently subscribes to the belief that life begins at conception and ends at birth as evidenced by his opposition to both choice for women and assistance for babies born into poverty. Here are a few more points:

• The top 20 percent of the population receives 66 percent of tax-expenditure benefits and 58 percent of entitlement benefits.
• The bottom 20 percent receive only 2.8 percent of tax-expenditure benefits and 32 percent of entitlement benefits.
• The top 1 percent of the population receives 23.9 percent of tax-expenditure benefits—more than eight times as much as the bottom 20 percent. http://www.cbpp.org/research/contrary-to-entitlement-society-rhetoric-over-nine-tenths-of-entitlement-benefits-go-to

legalized-tax-fraud

Vitter appears to be quite concerned about entitlement benefits, particularly food stamps, going to the citizens of the third poorest state in the nation and not sufficiently concerned about the outlay of billions of state dollars in benefits to corporations that provide few, if any, new jobs. That’s not conducive to running a successful campaign for governor—unless he is trying to appeal to a certain segment of the population, say the so-called 1 percent, which wants to deny food stamps, health benefits, and higher wages to the least of us.

That doesn’t sound like someone who wants to be governor for all the people of the state.

But then Vitter has always been all about Vitter—and a couple of special ladies he would prefer not to discuss in debates or any other forum.

Take the case of Derek Myers, the former television reporter who was fired after three weeks on the job after Myers asked Vitter if he still patronized prostitutes and added: “Senator Vitter, don’t you think the people deserve answers?”

Myers, an investigative reporter for WVLA in Baton Rouge confronted Vitter in a parking lot immediately after he qualified to run for governor last month.

Vitter’s office denied that it contacted the TV station about pulling Vitter’s ads from the station following the confrontation. Vitter spokesman Luke Bolar claimed he’d heard that Myers pushed a Vitter campaign staffer in an effort to reach Vitter.

Myers, however, said video of the incident existed that shows that he never assaulted any campaign staffer but that WVLA forbade him from making the video public.

For Vitter, the hits just keep coming.

Lamar White and CenLamar also re-posted a new story on Friday originally broken by Jason Brad Berry in which he revealed that three other witnesses have come forward to implicate Vitter as a client of prostitutes in New Orleans during the 1990s. http://cenlamar.com/2015/10/23/there-is-definitely-a-house-in-new-orleans-three-more-allege-vitters-involvement-with-nola-prostitutes/

This comes on the heels of a story published a week ago by Berry’s American Zombie news blog which published interviews with a former prostitute who says Vitter fathered a child by her in 2000.

Three years ago, a brief tweet exchange took place between Vitters twitter account and a 20-year-old college student from the New Orleans Westbank. The tweet to “LuvMy_Kisses” was quickly deleted but not before it was archived. The woman, identified as Daysha Scott, was asked to explain why Vitter was contacting her. She tweeted back, “I know something you don’t know.” http://gawker.com/5937761/why-was-philandering-senator-david-vitter-tweeting-to-this-young-lady-last-night

All in all, David Vitter, who entered the 2015 race for governor as the odds-on favorite, could now find himself suddenly on shaky ground if not for Saturday’s primary then certainly for the Nov. 21 General Election. Democrat State Rep. John Bel Edwards was generally conceded to be a shoo-in for a runoff slot by virtue of his being the only Democrat in the race while Vitter is opposed by two other Republicans, Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle.

In recent days, Angelle has pulled even with Vitter, according to some political polls.

The latest incident with the private investigator could be a devastating blow to the one-time front-runner and more details are almost certain to emerge in the coming days and weeks.