Conservative blogger, supporting Tea party candidate, breaks into nursing home where opponent's wife lives and takes picture for attack video.

Courtesy of TPM:  

I'm inclined to say this is what happens when you've got a Tea Party candidate who dabbles in neo-confederate and supremacist politics. But boy is this one weird and dirty. Here are the key facts. Incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran's wife has been in a nursing home for more than a decade. Precise details are sketchy but she appears to suffer from some form of advanced dementia and is in precarious health. The Tea Party candidate McDaniel has been dishing out an avalanche of oppo over recent days including a very weird article in Breitbart which in the guise of talking about spending on congressional trips was clearly intended to suggest that Cochran is having an affair. 

But now things have gotten really dark and weird (yes, we're on a very relative scale here.) A pro-McDaniel blogger, Clayton Thomas Kelly, was just arrested for breaking into the nursing home where Cochran's wife lives, videotaping her and then posting the video. Remember, this is an elderly woman who I'm told is in a fairly advanced vegetative state. So in addition to being a serious felony it is just ugly and awful in human terms. 

So Kelly got arrested and obviously it's an embarrassment for the McDaniel campaign since he's a supporter, appears to have had some level of contact with the campaign if not necessarily a relationship and seems to have been trying to advance (in a colossally weird and immoral way) the same wife/aide something something something story the McDaniel campaign has been pushing with the reporters. 

But here's where it gets dicey for the McDaniel campaign and where Cochran's supporters have pounced. It's pretty clear they knew the details of what happened before the news of what happened became public - mainly because McDaniel's campaign manager called her counterpart to commiserate and distance McDaniel from the incident. McDaniel himself also seems to have told reporters he'd only just learned of the story when his campaign manager had said he'd been bummed about it since he heard about it the night before.

Of course the McDaniel camp denies having any advanced knowledge of this break in:

"The McDaniel campaign found out about the break in when a local political blog posted about it at 11:40 p.m. last night," McDaniel spokesman Noel Fritsch said in a statement Saturday afternoon. "Senator McDaniel has denounced the break-in and called Senator Cochran to extend his condolences. It is unconscionable for the Cochran campaign and the liberal media to use the act of a sick individual to lob despicable accusations."

Yeah just because your campaign manager offers condolences about a blogger breaking into your opponent's wife's nursing home before the police release a public statement about it, doesn't mean you knew about it ahead of time, or had anything to do with it, right?

You know I don't necessarily follow Mississippi primary races all that carefully, but it kind of dawned on me that the name Chris McDaniels sounded kind of familiar.

Guess why:

Governor Sarah Palin today announced her endorsement of Chris McDaniel, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Mississippi, in his bid to unseat six-term incumbent Senator Thad Cochran. 

“I am truly humbled that Governor Palin has honored my request for her to join my campaign in this fight for liberty in Mississippi,” said McDaniel of the endorsement.

Damn, that Palin curse is one nasty bitch.