Dirty tricks

In England, the land of soccer, there is a saying that you tackle the ball and not the man. This goes along with Eleanor Roosevelt's famous quote, great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people. The point here is that when talking about politicians stick to policy and not personality. That was the case back fifty years ago. The personal lives of people like Eisenhower and Kennedy did not make the nightly news. Over the intervening years news people have discovered that you get more clicks talking about personality. A cynic might say this is because most people have small minds. Others would say it simply means more viewers means more profit. Now with the aid of the Internet we have a large group of researchers who wile away the hours looking for and finding all sorts of embarrassing tidbits to throw in the face of anyone they happen to be after on that given day. This can be a warning to any politician not to go after the personal life of another politician lest you want the same treatment and so it is left up to the outsiders to carry out this dirty task. Sometimes in campaigns this was used and was called dirty tricks. Or other times it was called dirty politics but in either case the practice has been greatly accelerated with advent of the Internet. Best get used to it as it is not going away and will likely get more popular. One good thing is that this should open the door to more women getting into politics since in most cases their past is not as checkered.