Police are familiar with all manner of nuisance complaints:

The music is too loud.

The car is “all over the road.”

The kids are cutting through my lawn.

And, yes, the perennial: My neighbor’s cat is doing his business in my flower beds.

So we have no problem with Auburn resident Brian Bolduc asking police in November to look into truck noise near his residence on Riverside Drive.

We don’t even mind him being testy and demanding about it; listening to trucks “Jake-braking” all day must be very irritating.

But Bolduc, both a state legislator and certified school teacher, was way over the top when he spewed profanity in his email complaint and said truck drivers “probably dont (sic) have a whole hell of allot (sic) of brains in their heads.”

To his credit, Bolduc quickly apologized for his remarks in a statement issued by the Legislature’s House Democratic Office the same day his email was revealed.

“My email was over the line,” Bolduc said. “I apologize for expressing my frustration in such an inappropriate manner.”

OK. Everyone take a deep breath and get over it.

That, of course, just doesn’t happen in partisan politics. When an opponent makes a misstep, his good friends in the opposite party are always ready to club him over the head with it.

And, we must admit, the media is only too happy to help. And help. And help some more.

The Maine Republican Party broke the story when it issued a news release highlighting Bolduc’s complaint. Party Director Jason Savage was “shocked that Rep. Bolduc thinks so poorly of the hardworking people who drive trucks for a living.”

Savage was also “shocked” that Bolduc “thinks that he can throw around, sort of, his belief in his own power, that he can throw it around and dictate to people what he wants them to do.”

What they didn’t mention is that Bolduc sent his complaint from a private email address and never mentioned that he’s an elected official.

Political operatives are never really dismayed when opponents make stupid mistakes. If Savage was shocked, it was only because Bolduc handed him such an unexpected Christmas present.

How might we know nobody in Republican Party leadership was genuinely dismayed by Bolduc’s blooper?

Because Democrats acted exactly the same way in June when Gov. Paul LePage similarly lost his temper and embarrassed himself.

You may remember the infamous “Vaseline” incident, when the governor also said, “People like Troy Jackson (an Allagash logger and Senate majority leader), they ought to go back in the woods and cut trees and let someone with a brain come down here and do some work.”

Democrats were similarly shocked by the governor’s indirect suggestion that loggers are stupid.

Now that we have clearly established that people in politics are easily shocked by the outrageous mistakes of their opponents, we’ll tell you what we’re shocked about.

Bolduc is certified as a social studies teacher in Maine, but his complaint to the Auburn Police Department is awash in spelling and grammatical errors, including: “survalence” for surveillance; “breaks” instead of brakes; “dont” instead of don’t; “wich” instead of which; and “ill” instead of I’ll.

Now we, as a newspaper, know firsthand how easy it is to make grammatical mistakes. But the errors in Bolduc’s email are so egregious and concentrated that we cannot believe he made it through college, let alone was licensed to teach students.

Remedial English might be in order before Bolduc takes a classroom position again.

rrhoades@sunjournal.com

The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.

Maine Democrat State Rep Lets Rip: Truckers”Don’t Have A Lot Of Brains In Their Heads”

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