Wednesday, July 3, 2002

[County Commission candidate Mike Wheat's] mail flyer caught my attention. Normally I don't get involved in politics and hadn't even given a thought to who I was going to vote for, still wasn't sure who all was running for what.

Then I saw a picture of [Wheat] in the paper and the next day saw what was supposed to be one of [his] signs on the front page of a newspaper (it didn't look like any of the signs I've seen around). Then I got a message on my phone that [Wheat] taped. I decided to dig the flyer out of the trash (sorry, that's where most of them go) and take the time to do a little closer studying of the information or should I say lack of information in that fancy, expensive looking piece sent of mail [Wheat] sent out.

Spending money isn't the only area where [Wheat is] free and loose. [He] must have spent a lot of time parsing through lots of information to come up with some of those wild yarns [he's] trying to spin. I'll have to admit that [he is] pretty good at this. Little bits of some of the information seems to be true, kind of sounds right.

It's just that when a person goes a step further and looks up what [Wheat] said, they find the sentences around those bits of information change what [he] said altogether. I'm still trying to find one thing that is a bone fide fact on that comparison chart.

If anyone reads real closely at how [Wheat] writes [his] stuff though, they'll see [he has] covered [his] backside. [He] stuck a whole lot of "may" do this or that in the claims and string two completely different ideas together to make it read as though they're related to each other.

My favorite is the one where [Wheat] ties the loss of 800 jobs in the county (that's about the number we lost in the county after Sept. 11, I think, isn't it?) to the litigation between the cities and county. [Wheat] can throw [his] hands up in mock horror and say [he] never intended to imply that Mr. Dunn caused those job losses, [he] only said they happened while he was in court with the cities. It just implies [Dunn] wasn't doing the county's business, that he was out stirring up trouble.

Folks all across the country lost jobs after Sept. 11, not just in Fayette County. If what [Wheat] were saying did happen to be remotely true, then the three cities' mayors must have been just as negligent since they were litigating, too. Not only that, since they're the ones who brought the lawsuit, it seems to me they'd be more inclined to be wasting their time litigating under the scenario [Wheat] attempts to paint. Besides, don't they have lawyers who do their litigating for them?

I'd think the commissioners are no more focusing on that little ant-bite of a lawsuit than Mayor Steele, Mayor Brown or Mayor Lee are. Or the rest of us in the county are.

Since [Wheat] likes spending money on things, maybe [he] ought to hire one of those uptown polling services to poll the county and find out what we really think is important. Or maybe [he] already has and they just didn't bother to call me.

Mr. Wheat, we aren't stupid out here in voter-land. You've come out strong, and you've come out wrong. Most of us don't want this county to look like downtown Atlanta and we don't want our politics to look like theirs either.

D. Cline

don_lex@bellsouth.net

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page