Last Time I Checked, Lying Is Evil

It’s been yet another nasty election season, and I’m tired. Tired of the sniping and the attack ads and the nastiness and the outright lying. One of my local elections has had me particularly — I don’t even know what the word is. Disturbed? Frustrated?

The race is between Dr. Hiral Tipirneni and Debbie Lesko. Per our local news:

Tipirneni is facing former state Sen. Debbie Lesko, R-Peoria, in the April 24 special election for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District. The women are vying to replace Trent Franks, who resigned from the U.S. House during a surrogacy scandal in December. The district includes Glendale, Peoria, Sun City, Surprise, and other west Valley suburbs.

Several of Tipirneni’s campaign signs and ads feature her in scrubs even though she hasn’t seen patients in over a decade (she’s been working in cancer research for the last several years). Lesko’s campaign took offense to this, claiming she was being deliberately misleading, and erected signs next to Tipirneni’s that called her a “fake doctor.”

However, Tipirneni has a valid Arizona medical license. She was involved in a malpractice lawsuit around the same time she stopped seeing patients, but the suit was later settled and she did not receive any discipline from the Arizona Medical Board.

I don’t intend to vote for Tipirneni, mainly because she bleats the illogical nonsense about wanting abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” and supports no limits on late-term abortion. Not surprisingly, she’s also a proponent of Planned Parenthood.

But I’m reconsidering my vote for Lesko given the stunt her campaign pulled with calling Tipirneni a “fake doctor.” I was so disturbed by it that I called Debbie Lesko for Congress and spoke to a person who identified himself as “Hunter.” We spoke for approximately five minutes, and the gist of his defense was that since Tipirneni hasn’t seen patients in over ten years, she isn’t a “real doctor,” and thus the signs were perfectly justified.

Using the logic of Lesko’s campaign, guess who else is a “fake doctor”?

Dr. Ben Carson, for starters. And Dr. Rand Paul.

Do they really want to go down that road?

Thankfully, Lesko’s campaign did take down the signs:

Lesko relented after ARMPAC, the Arizona Medical Political Action Committee, which has endorsed her, told Lesko in a meeting they viewed the “campaign signs as an insult to the medical profession, discounting the education and training required of physicians to become licensed and credentialed.”

I’m glad she listened to them, but for crying out loud. It’s sad that Lesko even sank to that level in the first place. Perhaps she agrees with Hillary Clinton that civility isn’t necessary in politics, but I sure don’t.

Stunts like this one are one of the reasons why I’ve changed my Arizona voter registration to “unaffiliated.” I’m still pretty firm in the “we should never do evil so that good may come of it” camp, and last time I checked, lying is evil.