The Masquerade Ball or Party, whatever your flavor, invokes many iconic images. Depending on your experiences with such revelry, these images may trigger varying emotions. For a backwoods country bumpkin like me, who has never been to a ball, masquerade or no, these images mean nothing.

Still, for those who partake, I have heard that the highlight of a masquerade party is the reveal. Depending on what lies beneath the mask, the unveiling can either generate a certain thrill or dose of disappointment. This is what we find in this year’s election cycle.

Both Mike Michaud and Emily Cain have reveled in their own political masquerade for many years now. Both are now trying to increase their prominence and garner the increased interest of party goers in the political promenade, but the harsh glare of scrutiny, on a bigger stage, has demanded the reveal far sooner than either would like. No longer can they simply glide in the shadows of their own hidden world.

Mike Michaud’s most recent false attack ad just highlights a pattern of dishonesty the Congressman has been able to mask, while hiding in obscurity in Washington D.C. The ad is simply a rehash of an MEA attack ad that was run during the Governor’s first term. So egregiously did the ad misrepresent the facts, that even the Bangor Daily News was obliged to run an editorial refuting the ad and rebuking the creators of it for taking the Governor’s words out of context. The mask has come off.

Michaud claims he is the only one who can work across party lines, yet many remember that when he served in the Maine State Senate as John Martin’s right hand man, they were known as one of the most partisan and ruthless political duos in Maine history. In contrast, a strong majority of the bills Governor LePage has signed into law in this past legislative session, were sponsored by Democrats. Something in Mike Michaud’s narrative doesn’t ring true.

Mr. Michaud also ran an ad with an interview of an “out of work” Maine man. The only problem was- the man wasn’t out of work. When the man was interviewed, he admitted the farce and said he had been told to sign a waiver, so that the campaign could use his interview any way they liked.

Michaud has run ads making false claims about the tax cuts. He now claims that he fixed the Veterans Administration, while we all watched horrified as our heroes died in waiting rooms. What did he fix?

Amazingly, he promoted a music video describing Senator Collins as committing lewd acts

Then there is the sweet and kindly Emily Cain, or so we thought. Emily Cain has run one of the most negative campaigns in Maine history, which has backfired on her. Again, even the Bangor Daily News has admonished her for the negative and deceptive ads, citing them as the reasons for her precipitous drop in the polls. The Daily admits that Bruce Poliquin has run a much more positive campaign focused on less debt and more jobs.

Cain’s only hope is that the allegiance she has formed with Blaine Richardson, who is polling at 3%, will be enough to thwart the wishes of the voters of CD2. This woman, who has never held a private sector job, who voted to force children to have mandatory weigh-ins at school, has only her own interests in mind and none of the peoples. It’s amazing what you see once you pull the mask off.

The beaver holds great significance in the lore of the Torbett family. No animal has had more impact and remains more spoken of, with a wry grin, in the dwellings of Grandpa Torbett’s descendants, for it was the beavers that started the war. Yes, the great beaver war of Lisbon, Connecticut.

 It was not a war that caused much of a stir for the rest of Lisbon, other than when officers arrived to inform my grandfather, while trying to suppress their laughter, that he could not fire his shotgun at the taunting rodents within the city limits. Still, it was the beavers that fired the first volley. It was a small, but very personal war between Grandpa and a band of marauding beavers, which had crept up from the marsh behind the house to invade Grandpa’s gardens.

 Yes, the garden was the battlefield. The beavers had dammed the slow moving bog, and the marshy waters had begun to encroach upon the fertile bank where Grandpa had his garden. The beavers also developed a taste for cultivated vegetables and they wreaked havoc on everything in their path as they searched for their preferred leafy delectable.

 Since local authorities had quickly eliminated firearms and, due to some intuitive premonition, had firmly excluded the use of explosives, Grandpa entered this battleground disadvantaged and outnumbered. His first foray was to rip holes in their dam in hopes of lowering the water level away from his garden and somehow encouraging the beavers to move into a more accepting neighborhood. His several attempts at this merely triggered the sense of industry within the little furry bundles of indomitability. He also succeeded in angering them. They retaliated.

 Grandpa soon began to see pieces of his woodpile appearing in the beaver dam to stop up the breaches. The beavers had not only invaded his garden by the marsh, but had now crossed the brook and invaded his home. This was intolerable! It was now open war!

 For months, Grandpa’s daily war with the beavers waged on (the family staunchly contends to this day that Grandpa enjoyed every minute of it), with no visible result save the precipitous depletion of Grandpa’s wood stores. But the beavers got too greedy and sealed their own doom. One late night, the flat-tailed, aquatic bandits made off with a recently purchased 4×8 sheet of half-inch plywood. Grandpa awoke the next morning to see it stuffed defiantly in their dam, blocking the latest Grandpa-induced breached, and mocking him in the glare of the morning sunrise.

 This was the last straw, or sheet. They had crossed the line. Grandpa succumbed to reality, and the advice of children and grandchildren, and called the game wardens to live-trap the beavers and move them to a more hospitable location. (I would suspect that some of you are thinking they moved them in right next door to you.)

 Sadly, we see this humorous, but true story played out here in the politics of Maine. The policies of our Governor have begun to tear breaches in the dam of the river of revenue built by zealous Democrats over some forty years. The flow of prosperity and industry has slowly started to move again and the stagnate waters of government bureaucracy have begun to recede away from the gardens, which contain the fruits of the labors of the people of Maine. Mike Michaud is determined to stop this and bring us back to the days when he and his master, John Martin, were taking from the hard earned wages of Mainers, chasing business from the borders of our fair State, and stealing the benefits from senior citizens in order to shore up the dam he and fellow Democrats had built to fill the tax-marsh of wages for big government.

 Not content even to raid our gardens filled with the fruit of our labor; our income, Michaud has crossed the brook into our homes and raided veterans’ benefits, senior citizen funding, and the very basic traditions that we pass down from generation to generation in our families. While the beaver is an amazing creature of industry that sometimes comes in conflict with another amazing creature of industry; humans, the corrupt politician, such as Mike Michaud, that wants your garden of finance and the stores of your homes, is nothing more than a shadowy enemy of the people of Maine.