Everyplace I go online lately, I'm seeing political ads for Lamar Alexander, who's running once again (sigh) for the US Senate from the state of Tennessee. Now why would that be, I think, glaring at his utterly nondescript features for the thousandth time as they appear on the margin of a liberal news site, Yahoo, and even on my Facebook page. In the first place, I'm a Democrat, and in the second, I live in VIRGINIA! Yep, that's right, Virginia, NOT Tennessee. And not just over-the-border Virginia, either, but way the heck up in the Shenandoah Valley! True, once upon a time I did live in Tennessee, for 35 years in fact, and so I know the good senator rather better than I'd like to. He was once governor of the state, and my late ex used to refer to him as "the next best thing to no governor at all". After that he was president of the University of Tennessee, and according to my father, who was a departmental chair there, the next best thing to no president at all. From there, he went on to somehow get elected to the Senate, and since then, he has been the next best thing to no senator at all. He not only lacks charisma, he's basically useless and somewhat stupid. Not unintelligent...he's intelligent enough...but stupid; there is a difference. Coming from a state that has sent such lights as Estes Kefauver, the Gores Sr. and Jr., and Howard Baker to Washington, Alexander is a real nebich in the fine sense of that Yiddish word, a nothing.....not even a rank embarrassment like his buddy and co-senator Corker (who always reminds me of one of those horrid yappy little dogs...but I digress).
So why, I think, am I getting these ads for this nothing guy? I live in Virginia, where we have two perfectly good Democratic senators; a little more conservative than I am, perhaps, but Democrats still. Of course I live in the reddest district in the state, with a Republican congresscritter I can't stand, but I write him critical e-mails frequently and return all his campaign literature to sender, unread. I can only figure that it's because I click on some Tennessee news sites every day in an effort to keep up with what's happening in the area where I used to live and where my kids still do. Which just goes to show that for all the spying Facebook, Google, and other advertisers do, they sure aren't very good at it!