“Politics is (un)civilized warfare.”

That phrase that my father shared with me has stuck with me over the past few months, as I’ve endured being a part of a campaign that I really enjoy.  Today, in the midst of professional campaign high, as far as being associated with the campaign, I got to experience the reality of that statement.  In all honesty, I also got to experience that, at its worse, politics is also uncivilized warfare. 

It seems that as a candidate I support garnered the local major newspaper’s endorsement (the Houston Chronicle, in this example) early this morning, the “uncivilized” portion leapt and researched campaign finance documents.  Oh, to be fair, it was possibly also the announcement that The Honorable Sylvia Garcia, State Representative Jessica Farrar, and HISD Trustee Juliet Stipeche all endorsed Cargas well before this was posted, too, that caused the uncivilized portion to just go overboard.  However, our opponent felt it necessary to take facts and answer them with hate and lies.  

So, what I’m perplexed at, is why both the candidate and her Communications Director blogger think this is going to be a winning strategy.  For one, the opponent has engaged in a strategy from day one in which she makes fun of Cargas supporters, including calling his wife, Dr. Dorina Papageourgiou, an illegal immigrant, because she has an accent.  When called on it, she claims it’s a myth, a lie that the other party is making up to turn people against her.  She said as much to me not five minutes before she turned around and made fun of me directly to my face, nearly four weeks ago, a fact I wasn’t going to bring up unless I had to.  Apparently, I had to.  

After today’s blog dropped, it’s going to be much harder for her to deny that she engages in a campaign of attacks, considering said blogger (*cough* Communications Director*cough*) sent out post cards to voters on her behalf: 

Theorizing that the campaign paid not only for printing of those post cards, but also the labels, and the postage, one wonders yet again, where her Campaign Finance documents are?  Misdirection only works so long.  (I think it’s beginning to wear off now.)  Because, while the Cargas campaign legally participates in full disclosure, something the other candidate continues to say she’s in support of, she fails routinely to participate in the act herself.   I guess she’s above campaign finance laws.   

It should be noted that attacks are where you go when you have no coherent structure on the issues: when you want to paint the other person as horrible as possible, so voters don’t look into you or your sordid background, so they don’t notice the lack of what you’re actually saying about issues that are important to this district, so they don’t notice how little you do actually know or that the source material you get that information from can sometimes be questionable at best.  

Of course I could go on and address rumours, innuendo, and hate.  I could also fight hate with fact, but the truth is: there’s no point.  The other side has shown exactly who and what they are, not just to me, but to this district at large, and this entire city.   They’ve also shown that they don’t care to report the factual corrections that they’ve received in the past.  Also, I’ve heard how horrible it is: I haven’t read it.  Because, truth be told, Perry Dorrell’s opinion doesn’t matter to me.  I wasn’t going to even write this up, but I had to.  

Think I’m overreacting?  Personally, I think I’m not reacting hard enough, but.. what else is there left to say of people like this.  

More importantly, after today’s early morning events, that the blogger and his candidate went with this kind of attack…? Seriously?