Politics! The mayor's race! Wretched, vicious, vile business! Now, that mean old attack dog Dominic Holden has written that "Joe Mallahan is an idiot" and rude, rude, RUDE Christopher Frizzelle has also written that "Joe Mallahan is an idiot." And the nickname seems to be sticking. MEAN!

Come, now, people! What the hell has the idio—I mean, Joe Mallahan—ever done, personally, to warrant such vitriol? Or ever done personally, period? I mean, besides providing attractive cellular options? Did he scrape someone’s grandma to death with oyster shells? March us into Iraq? Invent the damn swine flu? Seattle, I ask you.

The trouble is these haters insist on focusing on (ugh) “the issues." And let’s be frank: nobody likes “issues.”

Well, I’m a very occasional voter (much like Joe Mallahan), and when I vote, I don’t vote “issues.” I vote other things. Like hands. Fingers! Thumbs! Palms! Nail-beds! Hands say so much more about a candidate than "qualifications." And just last night I found myself in a most fortunate position to really scrutinize Mr. Gazillionaire Would-Be-Mayor’s hands. I won’t tell you exactly what that position was, of course, which would surely strain the frangible boundaries of good taste and discretion, but my stars! What hands this candidate has!

They are soft hands. So soft. Supple, really. Pink. Nicely groomed nails, tidy cuticles. Long, nimble fingers, good for grasping. And pointing! Pointing to God only knows what kind of future! They are the hands of a man who spends his days gently dialing, dialing, dialing… hands that have never pitched a sandbag at a rising levee, never sought to reach out to the unwashed masses, never wrestled with the notion of civic duty—but hands that make you really wonder about a millionaire that they're attached to, and his life, and what is in his refrigerator. The kind of stuff I want to know about a candidate.

So when you hear that Joe Mallahan doesn’t know his civic ass from his civic elbow, and that’s he is just some megalomaniacal money bag out to buy an election, or that he is, um, “the idiot”…you just remember this: Joe Mallahan has soft, soft, probably Jergins-smelling man hands!