The late Glenda Dawson was the Texas House Representative from district 29, representing parts of Brazoria and Matagorda counties just south of Houston. Ms. Dawson passed away on September 13, 2006.

As the Austin Statesman newspaper reported yesterday, the local GOP campaign in the district sent around a glossy flyer, showing Ms. Dawson with Kay B. Hutchison et al., without mentioning that the candidate had died.

Dawson’s web page in the Texas House web site also says nothing to disclose that she is deceased. For good measure, the page inviting you to email her also omits her death, as does the page listing committee memberships by member. The only way to glean the fact from this web site is to scroll down through archived press releases to her family’s statement on her decease, which is also not noted in the title or subject line for the release.

Spare me excuses that the Great State somehow hasn’t had time to update its records or that this is some sort of personal tribute. An old friend of mine who lives in Pearland, Texas, in the district, says that there are yard signs all over the neighborhood saying “I’m still with Dawson.” That is a tribute, and acknowledges the death.

What the Texas GOP is engaging in is deceit and deliberate deceit at the level of fundamental violation of trust. If you’re asking citizens to vote for a candidate, they have a right at an irreducible minimum to assume that the candidate is still alive.

BTW, citizens also have a right to know which party the candidate represents. We have a formerly Democratic state legislator in Maryland, John Giannetti, who switched to the GOP the day after losing his primary bid for reelection – but his signs as of last sighting still said “Democrat.”

Citizens also have a right to the minimal expectation that candidates will play by the rules of the election game. When Joe Lieberman switched from Democrat to independent running as a party of one, after losing his primary bid for reelection, he was supported not by independents but by Republicans from the White House on down.

What this GOP stands for is what the George W. Bush White House stands for, and if more Democrats could express it, the current elections would be a tidal wave: the core principle for our Republicans today, shorn of neocon nineelevenspeak, is simply that the end justifies the means.

Back to the Dawson item: does anyone remember that artificial outrage from the great noise machine when mourners at Paul Wellstone’s memorial service paid tribute to Wellstone by voicing some of Wellstone’s own views and positions? The mourners included Wellstone’s family members – who surely had as much right as anyone could have, to speak for him and to express his political stands -- and yet the airwaves roiled with bogus pieties from the corporatist right wing.