Montana Dems: Denny Rehberg Is Such a Drunk

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You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

The all-important Montana Senate race has gotten pretty nasty. How nasty? The Montana Democratic party is now attacking Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg as a drunk. Here’s the video, which was tweeted out by Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s communications director, Aaron Murphy, and the MDP (“@DennyRehberg trick or treats early—for vodka”) on Wednesday:

The context here is important: Democrats have made a concerted effort to paint Rehberg as, well, a bit of a boozer. As evidence, they cite the Rehberg’s 2004 congressional delegation to Kazakhstan, where he fell off a horse after downing six shots of vodka. (Allegations that he had consumed an additional 14 shots, and mocked his hosts by making “meep meep” noises a la Coneheads were unsubstantiated.) And in 2009, Rehberg broke his ankle in a boat crash on Montana’s Flathead Lake. (Both he and his the boat’s pilot had been drinking.) Tester, who won his seat by less than 3,000 votes in 2006, trails Rehberg by 0.3 percent in the Real Clear Politics average, in a race Republicans desperately need to win if they have any hope of recapturing the Senate.