Whole lotta hyperbole goin’ on!

I expect nonsense to be spewed during the weeks leading up to an election, and usually know enough to disregard anything said by a candidate of any political persuasion.

They want, after all, to get themselves elected. They’re counting on the fact that few people will ever bother to check reality.

BUT AS I write this commentary, I’m getting slammed with some nonsense that just needs to be called out.

It was Sunday night while watching television that I stumbled across Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner and his latest broadcast campaign spot – one that talks of Gov. Pat Quinn planning to slip a tax increase past us in secret the moment the Nov. 4 election has passed.

There’s just one problem – there’s nothing secretive about Quinn’s intentions. Anybody who didn’t realize what could happen come the General Assembly’s fall veto session next month is incredibly absent-minded.

For we’re talking about that increase in the state income tax that was approved a few years ago as a measure that would expire at the end of this year.

QUINN TRIED DURING the Legislature’s spring session to get them to approve a permanent extension of the increase; but legislators of both major political persuasions were hesitant to do anything.

It is why the General Assembly wound up approving a budget for state government that only has enough money to get Illinois through about January or February. It has always been known that the Legislature either was going to have to give in to Quinn’s extension preference, or else be prepared to make severe spending cuts throughout state government that will leave people even more ticked off than any income tax extension would have.

Quinn hasn’t been secretive about anything along this line. Heck, he told the Arlington Heights-based Daily Herald about this when he appeared before them for an endorsement session – which the newspaper wound up giving to Rauner (no surprise there)!

So to hear (and read the following morning in an e-mail message from the Rauner campaign) about secrecy and “a massive tax hike right after the election” just makes me ill.

IF ANYTHING, STUFF like this is inclined to make me think less of Rauner. Probably about as little as the Democratic Party-leaning operatives who sent me another e-mail message; one that suggests that the Ebola scare and the threat it poses to the public health of this nation is somehow a Republican Party plot.

The Agenda Project Action Fund is proud of the fact that it has its own advertising spots laying blame on the GOP for Ebola, contending that cuts in federal funds for health care initiatives have made us more vulnerable to a disease that some once wanted to think was limited exclusively to nations in west Africa.

“Republican Cuts Kill” is what this newest advertising campaign is called.

“Like rabid dogs in a butcher shop, Republicans have indiscriminately shredded everything in their path, including critical programs that could have dealt with the Ebola crisis before it reached our country,” the group wrote.

THERE’S NOTHING SUBTLE about that.

While I don’t doubt there is a way of twisting facts to make the problem so simplistic, the idea that either political party is to blame for the death that has occurred already – and the nurse who has turned ill despite wearing protective gear – is just nonsensical.

It’s got to the point where I dread television or e-mail – which the campaigns seem to like to use to send me their campaign ads, just in case I miss them on television.

Although I did find it amusing to get an e-mail Sunday from “Robert Redford,” telling me how I should support Sen. Tom Udall’s re-election bid in New Mexico – as though we’re all just the best of buds.

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