Who's dogging Melissa Gilbert's congressional run?

Say what you will about Melissa Gilbert's run for a seat in the House of Representatives, but the candidacy, announced yesterday, sure unleashed some fierce emails from the regional press secretary of the National Republican Congressional Committee. They sounded blog-ready — you could almost hear the chortling:


The message has the tone of a person who really feels he has a winning issue. An earlier email had declared with glee: “Hopefully tax delinquent Melissa Gilbert didn’t sell her little house on the prairie, because with $360,000 owed to the IRS, she certainly won’t be moving into the House of Representatives.”

As much as we love some of Gilbert's acting work, this blowhard is probably right. We have little love for Mike Bishop, whom Jack Lessenberry once called "Matty Moroun’s very own congressman," and yet if we had to choose one or the other, we might still sit it out. Why? Maybe the it's a quaint sentiment, but we sort of had this idea that a person should be intimately familiar with the place they're running for office, and the people in it. Can you be steeped in the experience of a particular part of the country in just a year or two in an old Victorian house? Probably not.

That said, Gilbert never had a chance to make her case properly before the NRCC flack dumped on her in the tackiest way imaginable. We believe it's tasteless to reach so far back into the past and condemn a candidate with pop culture references from 40 years ago. Truly, this whole thing went downhill faster than a little girl picking flowers and frolicking with her dog.