Ben Cline

Ben Cline is trying to claim that Beth Macy failed to show up for a second time to a “scheduled debate” of Sixth District congressional candidates, which, in fact, he scheduled to be a solo from the jump.

“This was the second of three scheduled debates, but Cline’s Democrat opponent, Beth Macy, skipped the event despite publicly demanding three debates over the course of the last several weeks,” a release from the Cline campaign claimed on Thursday, hyping his scheduled solo appearance with the Salem Rotary Club.

From the AFP archives

Our coverage of the Fifth District congressional race: click here.

What Cline doesn’t get – or does, and he’s just pretending to be dense – is, he doesn’t just get to dictate the terms of a “scheduled debate.”

Macy addressed the matter in a post on her campaign Facebook page earlier in the day on Thursday.

“Today, while Ben Cline holds a lunchtime Rotary Club forum (not a debate) in Salem, and no doubt will lie that I’m not there because I don’t like Rotary Clubs (which gave me a partial scholarship to college!), I will be attending a long-scheduled function at Melrose Plaza with members of Spectrum, which has been working on racial justice issues for decades here in the Roanoke Valley,” Macy wrote.

I’ll put the onus on the Salem Rotary Club here: they need to send out an invite to Beth Macy for a solo appearance, and let her set up an empty chair for Cline, otherwise, the Rotarians down there are the ones not being fair.

Ball’s in y’all’s court there.

Meanwhile, can we get Beth Macy to press Ben Cline on Trump’s beef scheme?