My congressional campaign that wasn't

Each year around this time, bad memories always come flooding back to me. I'm always reminded of what followed when I advanced my plan to run for Congress a decade ago.

As I was known as publisher of The Last Word (a fact that was pretty much an open secret), I figured I would throw my hat into the ring as an independent for the U.S. House seat for Kentucky's 4th District back in 1998. It was an open seat, for the incumbent Republican, the despicable Jim Bunning, was running for Senate. A publication in California actually interviewed me about my work and reported that I was a declared candidate - as I was.

My platform was based on undoing the Contract With America by repealing recent right-wing laws like the '96 telcom law and the welfare "reform" act.

But it came crashing down when some asshole - some stupid dick - went behind my back and e-mailed folks whose addresses they got off the Internet with all this wicked nonsense about me, which was then repeated endlessly on the Internet. This episode helped signal the death of the grownup. There's no excuse for people who were probably 25 at the time to talk shit about someone behind their back by exaggerating something that happened in grade school, and there's even less of an excuse for people who were 50 to spread these lies publicly by putting up 20 different websites about it.

Talk about a spectacularly insane grudge! By 1998, I don't think I'd heard such trash talk against me since - I don't know, probably about 1997, when I got about 70 harassing phone calls a month to this effect. And now I haven't heard it since this afternoon, when I got yet another call like this from someone apparently employed at the local hospital. (Phone harassment has been de facto legalized in Kentucky.)

After all the right-wing lies about me on the Internet, I forgot about my congressional campaign and turned The Last Word into a full frontal assault against the Internet thought police.

If I was tough then as I am now, I would have never allowed the online situation to get to that stage. To show you how badly the Nazis had me buffaloed, peep what happened on the 1998 incarnation of The People's Forum, the message board on my main website: After I made it a moderated forum, which required me to approve each post before it appeared, they continued trying to post their lies there. Yet I approved these defamatory posts against me, thinking it would shut them up if I did.

By the middle of this decade, I wouldn't put up with that shit - no way, no how. And in 2008, I damn fucking sure won't put up with it. Sometimes it takes a long time to learn to stand up and be counted - especially when through most of your youth, you were the one punished if you dared to fight back against the thugs at school.

There's a silver lining in the cloud of the war of '98: When acquaintances of mine saw this campaign of online terrorism, it created such bad publicity for the Republicans locally that the congressional election, which was considered a lock for Gex Williams, a Religious Right Republican, unexpectedly went to Ken Lucas, a slightly less conservative Democrat. The results were particularly stunning in my home turf of Campbell County, which nobody in a million years expected the Democrat to carry. On Election Day, this was the upset of the evening - and one of the reasons for it went completely below the media's radar screen.

If you buy the bogus idea that every third party or independent candidate is just a spoiler, then the Internet idiots screwed themselves even more: If I hadn't been forced out of the running, I may have taken enough votes from Lucas to throw the race to Williams. So they were stuck with a conservative Democrat instead of an even more conservative Republican that they wanted.

In later years, I seriously considered seeking public office again. When Democrat Gray Davis got reelected governor of California in 2002, the Republicans threw an absolute shitfit and decided to "do over" by launching a recall drive. If the GOP had put up a decent opponent, they wouldn't have lost, so it was their own damn fault Davis won. During the recall effort, the media promoted Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Republican replacement for Davis. I figured this idea was so outrageous that if I sought elected office in Kentucky, my candidacy couldn't be rejected out of hand. But I discarded this plan.

People have asked me to run for office since, especially now that I've registered as a Green, but I'll probably never attempt it again. But it's not completely out of the realm of possibility.