My instinct as a lawyer is to refute, repudiate and ridicule, point by point, the lies, distortions and base canards put out in print and online by my campaign opponent’s camp.
I started writing up a long legalistic brief, then thought: Why waste valuable time on their nonsense when there are still doors to knock, phone calls to make, and houses of worship to visit? Why are canards always “base”? Why do lawyers always use three synonymous words or phrases to express one thought?
I was going to fully address the mini-Nativist trope that was in the very first FB post about me when I announced my candidacy back in 2017: Just another Manhattan liberal moving up here and now trying to boss around us people who have been here for generations.
I even pulled out my birth certificate showing that I started out at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, and a report card from St. Anthony School in what was then called East White Plains, now officially called West Harrison, but always known as the proud Italian-American enclave of Silver Lake.
Those who try to decipher my handwriting now will get a laugh out of that 95 for Penmanship. And how ’bout those straight A’s for “Speaks Clearly”?
What the RDC nuns at St. Anthony’s taught us was that modern Catholic doctrine as declared in Nostra aetate required us to treat everybody with dignity and respect, no matter their religion or the color of their skin. Granted, in the Silver Lake community of about 5,000 souls when I was growing up, I can remember only one Jewish family and two African-American families. But the seed of tolerance and brotherhood was planted.
Then there’s the “Socialist/Communist” slur. Here’s a palm card received over the weekend depicting “AOC” presiding over a “LeftChester” with a little white cop chasing dark-skinned escapees from jail. Looks like they’re at loose in my friend Legislator Kitley Covill’s district, around the hamlet of Vista in the Town of Lewisboro. Hey, dumb criminals, you’re running parallel to the Connecticut border! You need to run across so you can at least give law enforcement the additional hurdle of an extradition proceeding. Jeesh, what meatheads!
And we Dems are accused of selling parkland, apparently including some cattle, which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
Also, there’s all the same old type of red-baiting. If you’re 65 years old and the federal government pays most of your medical bills, that’s called Medicare and that’s all fine and dandy. But if you’re only 63.75, like me, then covering you or me would put us on The Road to Serfdom. Indeed the Conservatives among us have always cried wolf over legislation that the vast majority of people see as simple matters of practicality, fairness and justice, including child labor laws, minimum wage, Social Security and Medicare. Take a look at this classic Ronald Reagan video especially around 1:25, where he does duly state, avow and aver, in 1961, that Medicare would lead to a socialist dictatorship.
In fact, the document that I have read repeatedly, and that helps form my decisions on law-making and on the moral act of investing the funds that taxpayers entrust to us, is not Mao’s little red book, but rather Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth) which talks about the rights to food, shelter, medical care, emigration and immigration, a good education and a living wage.
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas (or Vatican II) any more!
Please vote TODAY or vote TUESDAY for me and for my fellow Democrats.
Damon