Retraction on the Internet Guerrilla Post
by Bill Simon
I’ve received a phone call from Matthew Kramer of Politech.org whereby he informed me that not only was he (nor his company, nor anyone who works for him) not involved in the e-mail complaint scheme to shut-down the Kemp site, but he would never be involved, either directly or indirectly, in such an act.
My apology to Mr. Kramer for not thinking to call for his comments on the story before I released it.
April 21st, 2006 at 8:41 am
When Matt told me about the post and e-mail that incorrectly indicated that Politech had participated in something illegal and unethical, I was obviously concerned. I’m glad he was able to clarify things with Bill and that Bill got the word out, but I started thinking more about the event. It concerned me that even a hint of something inappropriate was out there for even a second.
My comment to this retraction and apology is probably just to make me feel better, but if you are bored, please read on.
It concerned me a great deal that a message would go out with such an error. I’m OK with people making errors. We are all human. But, this is a big one. And, it is one that contradicts everything that Politech has been doing the past 8 years.
As one of the founders and owners of Politech, I can tell you that we are not just technology consultants. We exist to make Republicans successful. We made that decision early on.
“Do we play both sides to expand our ability to make money?” That was one of the early questions to ourselves. We made the decision pretty quickly that we would never want to know that a Republican lost because of help we offered. We decided to stick with solely helping Republicans.
As a part of that decision-making process, we also decided how we would handle the situation of helping two competing Republican candidates at one time. Because we personally adhere to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, that was an easy decision as well. We want to see all Republicans do well and we conduct ourselves accordingly.
If someone were to ask us to do something illegal and/or unethical, we would flatly refuse. We are lucky that we have not been asked to do anything like that yet. If it ever came up though, beyond simply refusing, I would imagine we would also terminate our relationship with that candidate (and probably see if we could help the other candidate in some way to prevent the spread of an unethical politician).
We are Republicans for a number of reasons. The main reasons can be tracked back to core beliefs that we hold. Doing something unethical would violate those beliefs and contradict the reasons we are helping in the first place.
We have good experience helping direct competitors during a Republican primary. We have provided great levels of service to those competitors and helped both sides do well. We believe this was a vote of confidence by both customers regarding our ethics and service to Republicans.
If anyone has questions regarding our standards on what we will or won’t do, please feel free to ask me. You can reach me directly at john@politech.org.
Thank you,
John Trainor