Good to know, considering I voted fer him purely out of spite fer his Leftist opponent.
Thanks and FReegards...MUD
The Pumpkin Stumps
When I lived in central Illinois from 1993 until 1995, whenever the late-autumn election season rolled around, a few of my high-school fairweather acquaintances kept talking shit around the lunchtable about how they enjoyed periodically going out and "showing their community support," which was their snickering euphemism for running around local suburban neighborhoods at night looking for residences with campaign signs posted on their front lawns, and then setting these signs on fire. Even though this sounds to me like a perfectly plausible pastime for your prototypical Peorian pyromaniacal punks-of-privilege, I have my doubts about whether these conflagrative accomplishments really happened. But I understand the impulse.
This morning I opened my door and a bright yellow piece of paper fluttered to the ground from where it'd been stuck between the outer doorknob and doorjamb. Annoyed, I picked it up and looked at it; it was a flier featuring a crude pixelated cartoon jack-o'-lantern along with the message: "Even the Great Pumpkin is supporting Mark Earley for Governor." Truly? I didn't realize that the Great Pumpkin had an interest in Virginia state politics, much less any loyalty to the Republican party; I must have missed that particular Peanuts special. I noticed with further irritation that another copy of the yellow flier had been stuck underneath my car's windshield wipers. I'm not sure when exactly it became considered an effective strategy to actually litter voters' doorsteps and cars with scraps of campaign literature on Halloween night, but if I'd had any doubts about casting my vote for Democratic candidate Mark Warner, they pretty much evaporated as I fished that flier off my windshield and crumpled it up with a bristly insouciance.
I'm told that the reason Warner has the lead so far in the state polls, given that he's a Democrat in historically-incredibly-conservative Virginia, is that he is "out-GOP'ing" Earley in his campaign promises, and now I believe it, starting with the whole conservative laissez-faire bit wherein the government stays the hell away from my doorknobs and windshields during the dead of night.
I get the impression that this Great Pumpkin endorsement probably bodes more ill than good for the Earley campaign — the press has made bale after bale of hay of the fact that Earley's people couldn't even get Dubya to come down to Virginia to stump on his behalf; and so it doesn't seem to help matters much that, in a perhaps unintentional allusion to this situation, Albemarle County's local Republican committee has resorted to boosting their man by invoking a hollow supernatural perpetually-grinning fruit whose claim to funnies-page fame is that it never actually shows up.