The Daily Background

Yesterday while reading the conservative blog RedState, I stumbled across a video of College Republicans harassing a Democrat by making fun of him at a campaign event for Republican Michigan Senatorial candidate Michael Bouchard, where the Democrat was quietly videotaping Bouchard’ appearance– presumably on behalf of Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow. Polling indicates that Bouchard is trailing by 10 points or so.

The College Republicans had videotaped their immaturity and even proudly called it “harassment” and posted a video of them slapping Bouchard and DeVos campaign stickers (DeVos is the Republican candidate for Governor in Michigan) on the body and clothing of the young Democrat, who was not causing a disturbance whatsoever. Commenters over at RedState found the unprovoked harassment “hilarious” and “funny as all heck.”

The original description of the video titled “The Liberal that Followed Bouchard Around” read “College Republicans harass a Democrat who is attempting to videotape senate candidate Mike Bouchard as he walks around with supporters.”

After I posted a comment disapproving of the College Republican’s behavior calling it immature, and several other people followed my lead, and rated the video down (which was posted under the YouTube user id “RightWingSoldier”), the College Republican responsible for posting the video removed it. Still present on the user’s account is a video of the same group of exclusively white College Republicans, this time acting in concert with members of the “Young America’s Foundation” (a conservative youth group) protesting against Affirmative Action and claiming to be victims of racism themselves.

The video of the campaign event where the harassment took place includes red-on-white inter-title which brags “We tormented him by wedging our way between him and Bouchard (so that he couldn’t videotape), we made fun of his purse, and we stuck stickers all over him.” At the end of the video, there is another inter-harassing title which reads “Brought to You by the College Republicans.”

The young Democrat with the camcorder, whose identity is unknown, does not react to the harassment and apparently tries to ignore it, despite the fact that the College Republicans are sticking stickers on him, and in their own words “harassing him.” Republican candidate Bouchard does not condemn the behavior or say anything to try and stop them, despite being mere feet away from the harassment, which seems to have persisted for the better part of the campaign event.

Being the intelligent liberal that I am, I had the foresight to recognize that this video might just be taken down by the College Republicans, after realizing how immature they had acted, and that they had admitted to harassing somebody for their political beliefs. So I used a nifty little trick to capture the video from YouTube, which does not publicly allow downloading of videos, and saved it to my hard drive.

A few hours later when the video had been purged from the RightWingSoldier account, I located my copy and uploaded it to my YouTube account. You can watch the video here. A raw copy of the original video posted by the College Republicans can be found here (Quicktime format).

I took at look at RightWingSoldier’s account profile, and discovered that their lone subscribe was the Bouchard campaign’s official YouTube account. They had to have seen the video. It was posted and online before the last time they logged in at the time of this writing, 4 hours ago).

I have asked for a statement from the Michael Bouchard campaign, specifically whether or not they asked RightWingSoldier to take down the video or not, and have not received a response yet. With each hour that passes without a reply, it appears increasingly unlikely that they will reply, but if I receive one, I will be doing a followup on this story.

Followup: I just scared a Republican’s Senate campaign into trying to cover their tracks (photo evidence)

Filed under: oh six midterm Elections, Z-TDB Blog