Don't take your blogs to town, son

South Dakota War College has recently demonstrated and formally announced that its author, the aptly designated PP, wants to replace Jon Lauck, now a Thune staff member, as the state's major character assassin in the blogopotty. The piddling duel has become the S. D. Republicans' strategy of choice and the verbal squirt gun is their weapon.

While Sibby quotes the mindless malice of Rush Limbaugh incessantly, PP faithfully repeats and reproduces all the petty and absurd personal attacks generated by the GOP bladder boys. When it comes to actually addressing issues, PP often makes Sibson look like an Einstein. Character assassination is the only tool he seems to grasp.

His latest effort is to malign a Flandreau Santee Sioux lawsuit effort by making personal accusations against the law firm and one of its members, Scott Heidepriem, that represent the tribe. The post is an exercise in libelous innuendo. It calls for a state Supreme Court investigation of Heidepriem and the relationship of his firm and his role as state senate minority leader. While such an investigation would involve dealing with petty and baseless innuendos and be a waste of time, we wish Heidepriem would insist that it be carried forward. However much PP may wish to malign the character of Scott Heidepriem, he hasn't reached the point where he can spell his target's name correctly.

But the real issue that is obscured by the PP being squirted on it concerns equality and fairness under the law. Tim Giago, of the new Native Sun News and the Huffington Post (as well as a columnist for McClatchy and the founder of other Indian country newspapers) puts the lawsuit issue in an accurate perspective:

Unable to create growth through economic development because of the restrictions placed upon it by the state, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe brought a lawsuit against the state to change the law that prevented them from increasing the number of slot machines they could have in their casino. For more than 19 years the FSST has had to operate their casino while restricted to only 250 slot machines. The towns and cities around Flandreau have grown rapidly during this time and, ominously, the state of Iowa is in the process of opening a competing casino just across the border from Sioux Falls, a city that is the main source of revenues for the Flandreau casino. And while growth is happening all around them, the Flandreau tribe has been handcuffed and unable to join that growth.

Giago further explains an important aspect of the lawsuit:

Let's take a closer look at this ridiculous premise. First off, the profits from the casinos operated by corporations or individuals in South Dakota go into the private pockets of those individuals or corporations. The profits from the Indian casinos go to economic development, college scholarships, schools, road and building maintenance and improvement, health care, daycare for children while their parents work, law enforcement and tribal courts.

While the blogospher is filled with much self-adulation in its criticisms of the established media, its notes and commentary about blogs is limited to petty and irrelevant matters of personal animosities and taste, rather than the perfidy and falsifications involved in the character assassinations that some bloggers think is the stuff of political discourse.

As we near the 2010 elections, we promise that dishonesty and stupidity will not go unremarked. Some politicians and their henchmen will be held to account for past transgressions as well.