It's a weekend and I'm on vacation, so I really have no business blogging here. But this letter of resignation from Rod Montoya, 2nd vice chairman of the state Republican Party, caught my eye.
He says he's resigning because he doesn't like Congressional candidate Adam Kokesh's positions. That seems odd, given the fact that Kokesh got less than 20 percent at the GOP pre-primary convention compared with the 80 percent showing by his only rival for the 3rd CD nomination -- which would seem to make Kokesh a longshot for the nomination. Does Montoya think Kokesh has a good chance of defeating Tom Mullins in the primary? Is he saying that candidates who go against the grain of party orthodoxy shouldn't even be allowed to run?
Montoya said he's also frustrated by too many candidates in the Republican governor's race.
Here's the letter. I'm going back on vacation.
To Chairman Yates and the New Mexico Republican Party,
I regret to inform you that I am stepping down from my position in party leadership. I am unable to stand by any longer as Adam Kokesh, candidate for Congress in the third congressional district, continues to mislead Republican voters.
Mr. Kokesh has spent the last year re-making himself as a mainstream Republican with conservative values. Anyone who was paying attention to Mr. Kokesh’s rhetoric from the beginning, or has bothered to ‘Google’ him on the internet, knows that this is not the case.
Adam has made much political hay about his military service. To be honest; it is probably his only real qualification to run for Congress. Since returning from his second voluntary deployment to the Middle East, he has become a professional war protestor. He has even gone so far as to encourage soldiers to “consider the constitutionality of their deployment orders”, in other words, if you think your orders to go to Iraq or Afghanistan are unconstitutional they should not be followed. He told soldiers in Germany getting ready to deploy that if they wanted to desert, they would be assisted by his organization. - - Isn’t sedition still against the law?
This action, as well as dozens of others were documented and proudly promoted on ‘YouTube’ by Mr. Kokesh himself. However, many of his most outrageous acts have been removed from the internet once they became a negative in his race for Congress. Interestingly enough, the video of Adam disrupting the 2008 GOP acceptance speech of John McCain is still available for your viewing.
I went to Santa Fe last year to meet personally with Mr. Kokesh when his decision to run for office was made public. At that meeting he described to me his “libertarian belief” of self-ownership. He said that “since I own this body, no one can tell me what I can ingest, intake, inhale, imbibe, or inject into it”. This included heroin, cocaine, and meth.
His support of abortion, gay marriage, and legal prostitution were also covered by this belief. Mr. Kokesh is now saying whatever it takes to win the Republican primary. It’s not hard to guess where he will stand on the issues, when the election is over.
I have also been very frustrated, along with most of the other County Chairmen, by the unwillingness of several candidates running for governor to honestly assess their chances of winning. Unfortunately they seem to be driven more by personal ambition than what is good for the state and for their party. There have been far too many politicians, in recent history, who have taken this road and look were it has led us all - to the brink of socialism and bankruptcy!
In Republican primaries everywhere the argument between campaign supporters revolves around 2 issues, a candidates electability and their conservative values. It just so happens that in this year’s governor’s race, Susana Martinez is both the most electable and the most conservative. She has proven this in four previous elections for District Attorney, in a heavily Democrat county.
She brings Dona Ana County into play; no other Republican candidate does this. Last year’s municipal elections in Las Cruces were a clean sweep for Democrats. We must acknowledge that the Democrat Party believes Susana to be the biggest threat to their power.
Susana is exactly what our party and our state need at this time, I believe this and most of the county parties’ leadership believes this, just look back to the state pre-primary convention results.
It is now my understanding that one of our gubernatorial candidates is planning on submitting legislation that would do away with pre-primary conventions in the future. As you know, this process attracts hundreds of Republican volunteers and motivates people to get involved in the process. I guess if you don’t like the volunteer barometer, you just get rid of it and further remove the grassroots from the party.
As you know, I have worked to grow the role of grass-roots and county party leadership within state party politics. I have also worked to develop relationships between county party chairmen, and I have made it my personal goal to increase Hispanic participation in the Republican Party in general.
Because of this, I do not take my actions lightly or without careful consideration, but I am unwilling to just sit back and hope that the voters (in my sphere of influence) see through the smoke screen of misrepresentation and slick advertising.
However, I want to make it clear that I am not going to work for any one candidate, but I plan on informing the voters of specific candidate misrepresentations, I am going to personally support several candidates that I believe in, and continue my efforts to expand the participation of Hispanics in the party.
So, it is with much sadness that I respectfully submit my resignation at this time.
Rod Montoya - Party Activist, Reagan Conservative, and Concerned Citizen
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