"The most unethical, corrupt person I've ever met in my life is Shelley Berkley," appointed senator and dumb blond Dean Heller says.
Actually, in an embarrassing blow to Nevada's hard-won reputation as an unethical backwater where organized crime apologists get elected by acclamation and all public policy is determined by which sleazeball juice-broker can swing the most lucrative sweetheart deal over whores, cocaine and cocktails on any given day, Berkley and her wildly boring micro-scandal earned merely a "dishonorable mention" on CREW's report of the most corrupt members of Congress -- a report that serves as the sum total of Heller's campaign.
The dozen members of Congress who were named full-on "most corrupt" are, according to CREW, anyway, by definition more corrupt than Berkley. And presumably Heller knows all of them, especially the two-thirds of them who are Heller's fellow Republicans.
Plus...
Surely Heller knows Sheldon Adelson.
Heller knows Jim Gibbons.
Heller knows, or at least has endorsed, Mitt Romney -- although now he doesn't want to get any on him.
Heller and the other "grown up" Nevada Republicans would prefer to pretend that the Nevada Republican Party doesn't exist. Yet it is hard to imagine that Heller has never met state GOP chairman and standard-issue Nevada flim-flam man Michael McDonald.
Indeed, Heller is a career politician who has been in one elected office or another for nearly all his adult life. Name any prominent Nevada sleazeball, and chances are Heller has met them.
And the obvious specimen, as Ralston quickly noted on his new post-Sun website thingy, is the vile piece of work whose corruption created the Senate vacancy Heller was appointed to fill.
Berkley's new ad about Heller's drug-trafficking money-laundering crony is exactly the kind of televised noise that has nothing to do with anything that matters to anybody's life, which is to say it truly reflects the campaigns being waged by both sides in this dumb-as-dirt race for Senate. True, unlike Heller, Berkley has run some substantive ads on public policy. But evidently polling shows the best chance of winning is to join Heller and his handler Mike Slanker by mounting a campaign in the shit-covered, vomit-drenched milieu that is Slanker's preferred habitat.
One would prefer to see Berkley focus on dismantling Heller's puerile policy prescriptions and make a case for an aggressive progressive agenda. Alas, Berkley is not an aggressive progressive. So evidently we'll just have to settle for Berkley needling, taunting and teasing Heller, prompting Heller to ball up his fists and stamp his feet and yell "stop it you stinky poophead! You're the stinkiest poophead I've met, so there!"
In other words, the race is shaping up exactly as anticipated.
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