Today I caught, a little belatedly, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin’s editorial about the recent dust-up around Dino Rossi’s Forward Washington Foundation. The story, if you haven’t been reading along, is that a number of highly placed Democrats are grumbling about whether Rossi might just be, in the U-B’s words “using his nonprofit Forward Washington Foundation to finance an ongoing campaign for governor.”
Of course, Rossi has said he isn’t running for anything, and he hasn’t done anything wrong, which totally puts the issue to bed. The quote from Rossi is priceless: “Gregoire is clearly scared about something.” Yes, Dino. She’s clearly terrified that you aren’t running against her again. Yet.
The people of Washington, the U-B chides Dems, “want to know where Gregoire and Rossi (should they choose to run in 2008) stand on everything from education to corrections to tax policy.” Indeed! Washingtonians don’t have a stomach for scandals involving Republicans. Proven fact.
Now, hold the phone. Can we roll this whole thing back to the actual story, the one that underlies this editorial? You know, the story where a former gubernatorial candidate, who has been heavily rumored for either a repeat against Chris Gregoire or a US Senate run against Patty Murray, may be routinely and repeatedly misusing a non-profit that he runs? And maybe, just maybe, it’s worth noting the the only explanation that Rossi has for us is a flat denial and a refusal to hand over any real evidence that he’s running the Forward Washington Foundation above board.
Oh, yeah. One last point. You may have noticed that the URL for the Forward Washington Foundation is misspelled. I thought it interesting, so I looked it up in the OED. It turns out that just one hundred years ago it would have been totally normal to spell “www.forwardwashington.org” as “www.dinorossi.com.”
The more you know…
PS: Click here and look at the top result. Would Google lie to you?