A neighbor suffered the ultimate indignity last week – receiving a political mailing that came with a message that there was postage due!
Said neighbor, a friend of my wife, is at the stage of life in which confusion is the default response to any unexpected stimuli, and so she reached out to my wife for counsel about how to handle this and what it meant. After some details emerged, I told my wife I’d received the exact same mailing the previous day, but fortunately with sufficient postage attached.
My advice was to tell the lettercarrier this was not desirable mail and to encourage that person to try to get the postage due from the sender. The woman did this and the matter was dropped as far as she was concerned.
This mailing came in a white business-sized envelope – mine with my name handwritten on the outside, the better to trick the receiver into thinking it was perhaps something personal. It was not the maddening array of post-cards-on-steroids campaign mailers which assault my mailbox daily (two today, a slow day) that at least are transparent in their purpose.
Inside was a single page, obviously a copy of some original, that was a message on behalf of Afghan Amy, calling for integrity from incumbent opponent Frank Burns. Ironically, speaking of integrity and disclosure, there was no return address on the envelope, the better to help disguise who had sent it.
Inside was a sheet of paper professing to be from Jim Hargreaves (James F. Hargreaves at the end) with a purported copy of a letter to the editor previously run in the Daily Bugle exonerating Afghan Amy of any input in the sale of Conemaugh Hospital et al to Duke LifePoint. The message is that Hargreaves, trumpeted to be a former Conemaugh Health System board chairman, was giving Afghan Amy a pass on the hospital sale that has gone so badly for the community in terms of a decline in timely, effective health care.
The sheet called, expectedly, for a vote for integrity and Afghan Amy.
No mention was made of Afghan Amy’s association with Myopia 2025 and the attempt to work in secret to bring Afghan refugees to Johnstown, to fill the jobs locals won’t take, or some such blather.
When Burns was among elected officials who brought this bit of elitist, behind-the-scenes, dealing into the public arena, the effort was abandoned.
As for the hospital sale, Afghan Amy was the paid spokesman for the hospital who is on the record insisting it would be no problem and any surprises likely would be positive.
We’ve said before in this space there are two possibilities here and neither is a good look for Afghan Amy.
First, it could be that she truly believed what she was saying, which speaks of gullibility and brings into question her ability to represent the area well in the state house.
Also, it could be she knew better, but didn’t say so. I’m hoping that possibility cannot be true.
My other hope is for a decisive election result, and not to receive any postage-due political mail ahead of that.
Sam Ross Jr's site 