Anne Northup: The Courier Journal's David Hawpe is "abusive and dishonest".

Anne Northup is calling out the C-J's David Hawpe. She calls him "abusive and dishonest".

Here are excerpts:

The truth is, David Hawpe is obsessed with defeating strong Republicans who have conservative values, especially ones with competitive races. After 10 years of being one of those people, I can attest that he is abusive and dishonest. In his crusade against me, his focus stopped being about issues, the best interests of our community or fair play. It became an obsession about getting me, a conservative Republican, out of office. ...

His dishonesty was apparent in Sunday's column, [Editor's note: you can read the column here] "Our endorsements haven't undermined GOP's mental well-being." Make no mistake: David Hawpe is not fair to Republicans, and he wasn't fair to me. He never wanted to endorse me for Congress. The one endorsement I received in six congressional races was in 2004, when I was 20 points ahead in the polls and my opponent was so weak and uninformed that the newspaper would have lost all credibility if it had endorsed him, and Hawpe knew it. I'm sure it just about killed him.

After that 2004 race, Hawpe realized he could not just wait for a campaign to develop against me; he had to actually become part of the recruiting process. In one case, he wrote an unforgivable column against Jack Conway, peeved because Conway had decided not to run against me in 2006 and full of "code" words questioning Conway's sexuality because of it. In another column, he complained that my early opponents were not strong enough, and called out others to get in the race. He said that strong, competitive races were good for the voters and the democratic process.

Sound familiar? Those are the same themes he is making in his latest columns against Sen. McConnell. Is it personal and obsessive? Well, you don't see him begging a strong Republican who can self-finance to get into the race against John Yarmuth or Ben Chandler.

Any thoughts?