Is it really necessary to use the word “dirty” anymore when commenting about politics? Has it become redundant? Is there really any other kind?

This election locally and nationally has been as ugly and mean as it can get. There are no civil rules anymore for debates. Most incumbents won’t debate because they may be found out to be less qualified than their followers currently see them or, in at least one case, they may not give a damn what their constituents think.

The District 12 race for state representative has been a champion of mud-slinging for the past 20 years. You can do the math. This year the challengers for the position chose to withhold claims of illegal or unethical acts by the incumbent until the final two weeks of the campaign. They also made strong attempts to use the media to swell the significance of their claims.

It comes to no surprise to anyone that the incumbent plays by his own rules and will win at any cost as he has done in prior campaigns. But the challengers have set themselves up as targets of ridicule with similar antics.

The incumbent must not consider them viable threats because he hasn’t sunk quite to his lowest levels he is capable of, at least not yet.

Maybe he just forgot he was renting an office with taxpayer money and just forgot to use it. Or maybe that is where he goes to hide if a constituent who happens to be of the opposite party wants to ask him a question.

The battle over who should get to pick a Supreme Court nominee is almost silly. Threats and counter-threats abound.

Face it, the whole thing is purely a political appointment. It isn’t about fair or most qualified. It is about having control, and whichever party has the opportunity to seat a new jurist always will. It doesn’t matter which party we are talking about; that is just the way it is done and it won’t change.

If the balance of power shifts, you can rest assured that the other party will use any tactic possible to swing it back their way.

Call it dirty if you want, but it is the political way. If nothing else, we got another new term to use; court packing. Who knew that justices could be added as a way to change the balance of the court. What else can we pack?

And of course politicians are often their own worst enemies. Everyone from the POTUS down can benefit or lose all respect by using social media. We believe social media should be taken away from them the same way they have to give up investment rights and place everything in trusts. But that can’t save them from foolish acts like posting video and audio clips which show a candidate teaching a 5 year-old to smoke cigars, swear, and play disgusting adult-themed games.

He claims dirty politics got him outed on this, but anyone that stupid needs to be exposed for what he is. If it was his opponents manipulating the release, then that disgusts us as well, but more of the disgust falls on the incumbent this time.

This isn’t the first election term we were glad to see end, but this is the worst one and it seems quite fitting that it is happening during the pandemic of 2020. It is possible that the results of the elections and the Supreme Court nominations could carry over into 2021. Maybe a new year will give us a chance to find some acceptable answers to all this poor behavior and move us more acceptably toward a true United States.

— RV