Bill O’Neill was elected to serve on the Ohio Supreme court, the only Democrat on the seven judge panel, all the others being Republicans. Yes, the fact that in Ohio, even judges to the Supreme Court are not only elected but are nominated by political parties should tell you that I live in a pretty weird state. The rules require judges to retire at the age of 70 but they can stay on until they complete their terms of office which for O’Neill meant January of 2019, and he decided to run for governor of the state in the election to be held in November 2018.

Up until yesterday, there was no little indication that O’Neill was anything out of the ordinary. But then he released an extraordinary Facebook post that has to be seen to be believed.

Now that the dogs of war are calling for the head of Senator Al Franken I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males. As a candidate for Governor let me save my opponents some research time. In the last fifty years I was sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females. It ranged from a gorgeous personal secretary to Senator Bob Taft (Senior) who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents barn in Gallipolis and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head who was a senior advisor to Peter Lewis at Progressive Insurance in Cleveland.

Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.

Peace.

There are so many things wrong with this that it is hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with his presumption that he speaks for “all heterosexual males”, a grandiose claim if there ever was one. Then let us move on to the fact of his giving enough information to identify two of the 50 women that he says that he had sex with. That is reprehensible because there is no reason why those women and their families should have been dragged into this.

Then we have what is obviously boasting about his sexual liaisons with “50 very attractive females”. What has that got to do with anything? He says that he is releasing all this information to pre-empt people from dgging into his past to find dirt on him as part of the current “national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago”. But what is being discussed are not the sex lives of people or their “sexual indiscretions” but sexual abuse, a completely different thing. O’Neill seems to have taken this opportunity to boast about his sexual prowess, behavior so tacky as to defy belief.

I thought that the maybe he had done this to get publicity for his run. If so, he certainly succeeded. But not all publicity is good publicity and he has since withdrawn his post and asked people to “lighten up”. His communications manager has quit and O’Neill himself has suggested that he would withdraw from the governor’s race. But many are now calling for him to resign immediately from his judgeship as well.