Election strangeness is afoot in the county

Lou Marzeles
Editor and Publisher

     Full moons, vortexes in the Southwest, and elections are known to bring out the strangest of human behavior. And not necessarily in that order. There is election strangeness aplenty going on in Klickitat County of late.
     Fresh fodder for the strangeness quotient in this election has arisen. Barring unforeseen developments, the only place it will be written about is here, now, in this editorial.
     Information (the word is used liberally) has come to The Sentinel office in various forms about goings-on between certain candidates for county offices. If you haven’t heard about it, you may be assured that if it were truly newsworthy, you’d be reading about it in these pages; and since you won’t see it here, it means it’s not truly newsworthy. It is, however, comment-worthy, for reasons that should become clear momentarily.
     First came a letter to the editor about an incident that occurred at the candidates’ night in Bickleton. The matters mentioned in it, referencing an alleged physical attack on a particular candidate by another candidate, were so serious that we called the writer of the letter for verification. That person revised the terms used in the letter to something so far removed from the original terminology that we chose not to run the letter.
     Subsequently came comments from strollers-in to the office, a few more or less reporting similar aggression against the candidate in question, others reporting that they could see no possible way the actions in question could be construed as serious, let alone criminally actionable as some have asserted. There was, considering all accounts, a lot of vitriolic exaggeration about the actual incident.      Did the exaggeration originate with a particular candidate? We don’t know that, but it’s certainly clear it came from some of that candidate’s supporters.
     What really happened that night? Something certainly did, though its significance apparently rests in the sensibilities of those who beheld it. And that’s where strangeness comes in. Oftentimes what people say says more about themselves than it does about the people they’re talking about.      Sometimes people protest too much.
     What happened to respectable campaigning? To like vanilla, do you have to hate chocolate? Someone here may need a time-out. In elections, that’s called defeat.