Lt.
Col. Russell to the Rescue
The man who could topple Jack Murtha.

By Michelle Malkin

Even more amazing: The 45-year-old Russell, a Desert Storm
veteran, former Army lieutenant colonel and Army reservist who survived the
Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon, was not even publicly campaigning
during the quarter. He is on active duty with the Army until after Aug. 1 and
is barred from actively campaigning until then.

If all that didn’t make this enough of an inspiring David and Goliath story: In
February, a Pennsylvania
judge ruled that Russell had failed to collect enough signatures to make the
primary ballot. But Russell refused to give up on his goal of permanently
redeploying Murtha from his entrenched seat of power in Washington. The GOP neophyte persevered on a
shoestring budget and won more than 4,000 write-in votes in the spring to earn
a spot on the general election ballot. According to Russell’s campaign manager
and veteran GOP activist Peg Luksik, the bulk of contributions from about
16,000 donors in the second quarter were less than $50.

Russell’s clear on where he stands. No doubt Barack Obama would label him
bitter and clingy. “I am a Conservative,” he says in his defining campaign
statement. “I believe in the sovereignty and security of this one nation, under
God. I believe the primary role of government is to provide for the common
defense and a legal framework to protect families and individual liberty. … I
believe that no one owes me anything just because I live and breathe.”

The excitement and buzz around Russell stand in stark contrast to grass-roots
disgust on the right with Beltway Republicans who continue to push the party to
the left in a brain-dead attempt to “rebrand” the GOP. He has united pro-troops
families, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, Reagan Democrats and
Independents fed up with Murtha’s culture of corruption dating back to his
Abscam days in the 1980s. Murtha was not indicted in the infamous bribery
probe, but he was videotaped entertaining a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI
agents posing as emissaries for Arab sheiks trying to enter our country
illegally.

“The incredible story about Bill’s campaign is that the $15 and $25
contributions are coming in from all over Pennsylvania and every corner of the
country,” Luksik noted on the Russell Brigade website (www.russellbrigade.com).
“This is K-Street versus Main
Street. These are patriotic families expressing
support for soldiers, sailors and Marines, and people saying they’ve had enough
of the old ‘pay-to-play’ culture in the Capitol. That’s what’s fueling this
campaign.”

Russell decided to enter politics after hearing Murtha’s slanderous 2006
accusations that Marines in Haditha “overreacted because of the pressure on
them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” As I reported in June,
seven Marines have been cleared or won case dismissals in the Iraq war
incident Murtha recklessly adjudicated in the court of public opinion — with
willing mainstream journalists at the New York Times, MSNBC, and in
the world press swinging their nooses.

Perhaps that complicity explains the great media wall of silence around
Russell’s upstart campaign. Republican Bill Russell offers ethical,
freedom-enhancing, pro-responsibility, anti-retreat, unapologetically
conservative change they don’t want to believe in.

© 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.