I was just going to make a quick update to the previous post, but then I witnessed what has the wacky wing of the Higgins campaign (note my assumption that there is an as-yet undiscovered wing) so scared of Malcolm Baldwin, and why the resulting implosion shows no sign of ending.

The previous post began by calling attention to this comment outing embarrassing Higgins campaigner David LaRock, who was upset at the number of Malcolm Baldwin yard signs next to Mike Chapman signs.

[David] LaRock suggest [sic] Mike go around and take down the signs posted next to Baldwin signs..

Now there’s this admission from the other one, Sally Mann:

Most of the signs are gone now.

Ok, I just swung through Hamilton on my way home, and if “most of the signs are gone now,” I have to ask how many were there before. Just on the main drag I counted five or six yards with both Baldwin and Chapman signs. All but one had no other signs that would help identify the owner as either a Republican or Democratic crossover voter (one also had a Shawn Mitchell sign). One of them was the home of a friend who is solidly Independent, so that’s not much help.

Keep in mind that these geniuses are demanding that the Chapman signs be “taken down.” The signs of their own guy. The Republican. I tried to look at those signs together and think the way they do, just as an experiment, and I couldn’t do it. I could only think what a great thing it is that a bunch of people who are voting for a Republican also think highly enough of Malcolm Baldwin that they’re voting for him, too.

Sally Mann continues her comment with this outstanding whopper (which she’s apparently also been trying to plant here and there as an ‘anonymous’ rumor):

Peeple [sic] are saying the Weintraubs* are managing Baldwin’s campaign, and put up the signs in the middle of the night– as a stunt before the big walk– some signs were placed without permission.

(*The idea of “the Weintraubs” managing a campaign is pretty preposterous, except that, well, we’re talking about Sally Mann. -Epl)

I thought I was just being fair when I was careful to say that I didn’t think LaRock had been talking about taking yard signs from private property. Maybe I was being far too charitable. Sally goes on to state explicitly that the offending Chapman signs were removed from the private property of Democrats, because, she “explains”:

Some people who allowed signs thought that Chapman was a Democrat, endorsed by Malcolm Baldwin, and when they found he was an R, they took the sign down!

I guess that’s possible. I have no way of knowing for sure. But possible isn’t the same as likely, and it certainly isn’t the same as true. The fact is that Malcolm has endorsed Mr. Chapman – the endorsement is prominent on his website – and it seems very unlikely that this endorsement would not be having a substantial effect on the Sheriff’s race in Catoctin. It seems more likely that most Democrats with both Baldwin and Chapman yard signs are well aware that Chapman is a Republican, and that in reality we are all choosing a Sheriff from among three Republicans. I just find it unlikely that Democrats in Catoctin are behaving in the way that Sally Mann describes – it sounds more like a projection of Sally Mann. And unless she and the other Higgins operatives are saying that they visited the homes of Democrats to relieve them of their Chapman signs, I don’t know how she would have come by this knowledge.

The whole thing rings pretty false. If it’s true that Sally Mann and her friends set things straight for all those supposedly naive Democrats with Chapman signs, then why does she say that the signs ended up in the trash? Shouldn’t they have recovered the signs and returned them to the Chapman campaign? And if it wasn’t them, how can they claim knowledge of what these people thought? Maybe the signs were taken during the night by elves, and Sally and her friends can read minds. Hey, it’s possible. After all, Chapman’s signs are “confusing” and “green.”

Here are some other possibilities that explain the signs I saw:
1) The signs that are “mostly gone now” were taken without the property owners’ consent, and those owners have replaced the signs.
2) Sally & friends successfully got rid of all the Chapman signs in “naive Democrats” yards, and the remaining sign pairs that I saw this afternoon were in the yards of Republicans crossing over to vote for Baldwin.
3) Sally made the whole thing up.

What’s your theory?

Maybe someone out there has first hand knowledge of these alleged events and can help us solve this mystery.

I think I get the important part, though. The belief expressed over and over in these comments is that casual observers will associate the two signs and mistakenly think that there’s a Democratic Sheriff’s candidate – it’s expressly not that some people might mistakenly think that Baldwin is the Republican candidate. These clownshoes aren’t concerned about a misunderstanding that might actually hurt the Republican candidate, in other words. That’s not really their problem. Their problem is that they are so unable to accept the broad crossover support for Malcolm Baldwin – which I think is there precisely because he’s the kind of guy who would endorse someone from the other party if he thinks they’re the best one for the job – that they would rather invent a wild conspiracy theory that doesn’t even make sense and attack their own candidate than attempt to deal with the truth.