{"id":10200,"date":"2013-10-23T00:49:38","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T05:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=10200"},"modified":"2013-10-24T11:29:10","modified_gmt":"2013-10-24T16:29:10","slug":"scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=10200","title":{"rendered":"Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was cold and unpleasant and I just couldn&#8217;t bring myself to go door to door. Shame on me.<\/p>\n<p>My only scheduled campaign activity was a League of Women Voter&#8217;s forum at the new and improved Grant School. Its been renamed Myers-Wilkins Elementary. <\/p>\n<p>I spent my afternoon catching up on some reading until I got a call from a television reporter. She all but called me a liar twice then sent a reporter over to tape an interview. <\/p>\n<p>The scandal didn&#8217;t amount to much as far as I could tell. It revolved around whether I was really a &#8220;retired teacher.&#8221; The lead reporter told me &#8220;anonymous sources&#8221; had outed me and that there were no records of my ever having taught in Proctor or Duluth. My first reaction was to laugh. Had I caught on to the real scandal I might not have been so jolly.<\/p>\n<p>The news hound at my home left no doubt disappointed with the dates, locations and witnesses I&#8217;d offered him. He left but set up his camera in my front yard to point at the word &#8220;honesty&#8221; on my lawnsign.<\/p>\n<p>A second reporter&#8217;s call cued me into the real scandal. Someone tried to plant a real hatchet job in my campaign. So far nothing has shown up on the news. I decided there and then to put an ad in the next Reader Weekly. I&#8217;ve been thinking I ought to do it since the Reader has published my columns for years. Only this would be a larger ad than I had envisioned. It might be a full page ad that I&#8217;d have to pay for myself because most of my funding has dried up. <\/p>\n<p>This is the third time someone has tried to smear me. The first was Dixon&#8217;s pal Ralph Doty. He nailed me three days before the 2006 election. The second time was a few years ago when I took JCI to court. I got an unexpected call from the Editors of the Duluth News Tribune telling me that they were going to run a story the next day about how I had threatened the lives of some fellow&#8217;s children. The fellow had been hounding me for weeks in angry emails and I&#8217;d started getting curt with him in my  replies. <\/p>\n<p>I called the editor back and left the foulest message I&#8217;ve ever left for anyone on an answering machine. I think it got listened to by everyone at the DNT. In my message I promised to send the long string of emails for them to see the emptiness of the fellow&#8217;s allegations. Once the Editors read them the story was scotched.<\/p>\n<p>This time I got word of the smear two weeks in advance of the election. The rumor may die on the vine but I have little but contempt for anonymous character assassins.  <\/p>\n<p>After the forum I was pulled aside and warned that someone was about to smear me. I explained that I was aware of the plot and, of course, when I got home from the forum I watched the menacing television news report. There was nothing&#8230;&#8230;.at least not yet.<\/p>\n<p>I turned on my computer and typed up a quick 500 word commentary on the situation. I completed it by Midnight and it will be in this week&#8217;s Reader Weekly. Telling the story to an audience larger than this blog will help me get some sleep tonight.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was cold and unpleasant and I just couldn&#8217;t bring myself to go door to door. Shame on me. My only scheduled campaign activity&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10200"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10207,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10200\/revisions\/10207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}