16 October 2022

Dear Ms Frowny:

…because there's nothing positive and smily about any of your campaign ads. Not even the ones in which you extoll your "virtues" as a caregiver for your wounded-in-Iraq husband (at least not to those of us who have a clue of any kind about either being a caregiver to the disabled or the systems for obtaining assistance). But you've gone over the line — on the facts, on the ethics, on the bigotry.

Some people who took out student loans for their law degrees had families, or disabilities, or really disadvantaged backgrounds (and, BTW, Ms Frowny, do you have a clue of any kind how much a bachelor's-degree-plus-law degree costs in this state, that has only one public law school, itself producing only 170 or so lawyers annually — less than the number necessary to fill in-state government law jobs coming open)? More to the point, not a lot of them will be eligible for any of the student-loan relief… unless they took those government jobs, or other public-service jobs, or ran into medical or other circumstances that pushed their incomes below $125k for individuals/$250k for married-filing-jointly. And exactly how are "taxpayers making less than $75k a year" going to be harmed when the lawyer handling their divorce, or their DWI defense, or whatever, can either charge them less or just be there because monthly student loan payments decreased by half a car payment a month? Meanwhile, Ms Frowny, your undergraduate degree is from a school whose annual undergraduate tuition is almost 20% higher than that for the UW's law school, and approximately three years of UW undergraduate tuition, which leads to other… questions…

The disability card isn't going to help you, either. I'm not going to participate in a dick-measuring contest for whose family-member disability/ies has/have been more difficult to overcome (besides: I've had to be the mohel who ended more than one of those contests, and no anesthetic will work on my sarcasm). And I'm not married to a disabled vet…

Then there's the bigotry. The ardent and overt antiintellectualism. The identifies-with-rural (although Pasco isn't exactly East Podunk, having grown from East Podunk in the 1930s to a city supporting a nukular plant with big-city nukular technicians and engineers) against the evil citydwellers in Seattle (which has always been the place through which the rural folk got their stuff to market… and the place that trained most of the doctors and nurses and therapists and other providers to help those with disabilities). The implicit Nordwesteuropäer über alles in your appearance, in the backgrounds of your ads, in your rhetoric, in the subtexts of what you criticize and what you support… in your apparent unfamiliarity with the demographics of the next-county-to-the-west-but-still-east-of-the mountains.

The Heffalumps need to remember that being "the party of Lincoln" also means being "the party of Andrew Johnson, and Warren G. Harding (not to mantion Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge), and Strom Thurmond, and Tom Reed, and Jeff Fortenberry, and any McCarthy." Which is not to say that the Jackasses don't need to get my generation out of the way, so that we don't end up with William O. Douglas again (gee, someone else from the east side of the mountains). But I'm getting really bored hearing attacks on professionals coming from those with professional degrees…