Let me apologize. The name of one of the candidates in my district's state senatorial election is "Rose Heck". I tried using her name in a pun, but failed. Somehow, a good "fuck" always wins out against a pathetic "heck" every time.
For the past two weeks, I've received postcard after postcard from this old hag, Rose Heck (Republican), as well as the slimeball she's running against, Joe Coniglio (Democrat). Some days, I received one postcard from each candidate, and some days two postcards from the same candidate.
One day, I was convinced that the Democrats found out about the particular postcard the Republicans were mailing that day. The Republican postcard had a picture of a hand putting money into a piggy bank. The headline said something about how Rose Heck saved New Jersey so much money. The Democrats' postcard, which was delivered the same day, had a photo of a piggy bank being smashed, along with the headline, "What the heck is Rose Heck doing with our money?" (Amazingly, I wasn't the first person to attempt to use Rose's last name in a pun.)
Day after day, postcard after postcard, these two candidates threw proverbial pig shit back and forth at each other. It's just unfortunate that my hands had to serve as the intermediary between candidates. Every time I handled a postcard, it was like one candidate was nudging me on the shoulder and saying:
"Hey, you. Can you pass this pig shit over to that other candidate for me? Thanks, I appreciate it."
I've seen so many photos of Rose Heck, I think I'd recognize her if she were caught on video shoplifting a liquor store, and all the police had to go on was a couple of eyeholes in her ski mask.
And Rose Heck's photos appeared just as often on her competitor's postcards as on hers. Don't you love those photos that political campaign teams choose to represent the opposition? If there were one time in your life when someone snapped a photo while you were picking your nose with your middle finger while scowling at a baby, that would be the one they'd use.
Overall, I'd have to say that Joe Coniglio, the Democrat, was somewhat higher on the sleaze scale. My personal favorite postcard that his team sent was the one accusing Rose Heck of "illegally" taking money from Enron. For some reason, they decided to stop short of calling her a Nazi, but tossing "Enron" around ain't bad either.
My favorite photo of Joe Coniglio is the one that Rose Heck used in her last postcard (in addition to one or more previous cards). It's a head-shot of Coniglio sleeping, presumably while at some political meeting. In other words, this particular argument against Coniglio amounts to: "See? He fell asleep in office once. Therefore, he's incompetent." Now, I'll agree that falling asleep while you're on the taxpayers' payroll (if that's actually what happened) isn't the best way to demonstrate your allegiance to the citizens of your state. However, I fell asleep in class so many times I wouldn't even guess the number for fear of underestimating. If I could fall asleep almost daily in freshman-year Calculus, I'm damn sure I'd be nodding off when some putz in the New Jersey senate started talking about noise pollution at the Teterboro airport.
Perhaps the most amusing piece of political direct mail I received in the last two weeks was the letter from some rabbi or Jewish activist. Because my last name is "Roth", multiple Jewish organizations have been sending me mail for about ten years now. This Jewish guy thought I'd want to vote for Heck (or was it Coniglio?) because... well... you know. Because we're both fucking Jewish.
In addition to the letters and the postcards, of course there have been the telemarketing calls. The telemarketing calls, might I add, which are allowed even though my name is on the national do-not-call list. For some reason, politicians didn't want political calls to qualify as "telemarketing". What a fucking surprise. I guarantee that some politician, somewhere, is using "free speech" to defend political phone calls, as if free speech doesn't apply to people in the marketing business. (The reality is that "free speech" has nothing to do with either type of call. The issue is private property; namely, it's my goddamn telephone.)
Political telemarketing pisses me off much more than political direct mail. The direct mail I can just throw away, plus it amuses me. The phone calls, left on my answering machine, aren't so easy to get rid of. Granted, I have one of those old-school answering machines with the freaking cassette tape which means I need to manually fast-forward or rewind the tape, but still, I don't want my telephone used as an instrument for my own sodomy.
After all this slime, do you really think I'm going to make the three-minute trip down to the election booth?
Heck, no.
