Inspired by the deluge of savage attack ads that have made the Republican primary season so informative and jolly fun to watch, I’ve have decided to allow unnamed persons who think I’m pretty swell if terribly misunderstood to form my very own Super Personal Action Committee to set the record straight on my dirty rotten opponents.

For the record, I’m calling mine the “Jim Dandy Super-PAC,” though to avoid going to the “Big House” I am legally obliged to tell you up front that I have no idea who is behind my Super-PAC ads or where they get their money. Super Political Action Committees, you may recall, exploded after the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that corporations and special interest groups are actually “people,” thus entitling them to use public toilet facilities and spend unlimited funds on spurious advertising that promotes one candidate’s moral fitness while grossly distorting an opponent’s record and character.

Ordinary citizens and regular political action committees, of course, have strict limits placed on how much financial support they can provide to any given candidate. But Super-PACs are unhindered by outdated concepts like personal responsibility or professional integrity. In short, they can say or do anything with absolute free-market impunity.

The high court’s apparent logic was that Super-PACs might do wonders to encourage participatory democracy on the grass-roots level — sort of along the lines of what a junior high bathroom break does for gossiping teenage girls.

Historically, back in the dark ages of American politics just a few years ago, candidates for higher office — even those who claimed to be actual “people” — were sadly restricted to simply questioning an opponent’s voting record and commitment to particular issues, at the outside having flacks discreetly spread rumors questioning whether said opponent has, in fact, genuinely quit beating his wife and/or was recently found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.

But all of that has changed with the explosion of Super-PACs designed to openly eviscerate an opponent without fear of having to reveal anything — a concept that could have far-reaching commercial benefits to thieving CEOs, miscreant husbands, misbehaving celebrities and spurned lovers everywhere.

For example, I’ve waited donkey years to get the truth out about certain individuals who ruined my early attempts at love and politics — beginning with my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Wettington.

Yes, it’s true. For years I politely described Miss Wettington as “a sad maiden schoolteacher whose somewhat rigid rules about public behavior and love of Italy made a strong impression on me.” But that doesn’t come anywhere close to the truth about this walking nightmare of a public-school teacher, this psycho in sensible shoes.

Frankly, as the candidates and their Super-PACs have done this season, it’s time to take the gloves off on Miss Wettington.

As a new 28-minute documentary being produced and paid for by my unnamed friends at the Jim Dandy Super-PAC will soon make clear, Miss Wettington was in fact a sadistic spinster who smelled like Vicks VapoRub and favored men’s clothing and kept an autographed photo of Benito Mussolini in her desk.

On school field trips she was known to carry a riding crop and once lined up every boy in the classroom for a Gestapo-like interrogation session in the janitor’s closet after she discovered someone had written “Miss Wettington is really a man” on the tile wall of the boys’ bathroom.

My big mistake was asking her how come she knew what was written on the boys’ bathroom wall was that she wasn’t, in fact, a man. Though Woody Futch was the offending scribbler, I wound up taking the fall and missing two weeks of recess, from which I’ve never fully recovered.

Down and Dirty

Then there’s sweet Kathy Crump. So friendly, so blonde, so seemingly pure of heart.

Pure as the driven slush is more like it. She took my tender seventh-grade heart in her tiny soft hands and, as my Super-PAC will soon reveal, dropped it on the floor and stomped that sucker flat.

Kathy’s mother was the dietitian for our our school cafeteria, and I was so smitten with her daughter that I agreed to accompany Kathy to a Wednesday night youth revival at the Florida Street Baptist church and be baptized for a second time in a large plastic swimming pool, after Kathy hinted that she might invite me to the spring twerp dance and accept a mood ring.

Following the indignity of having to walk home in soaking wet clothes, I was forced to encounter a ticked-off Lutheran mama whose mood was anything but understanding. As a result, depressingly, I wound up having to serve as acolyte at our church for an entire summer.

Kathy, meanwhile, artfully employed our faux courtship to snag the interests of junior letterman Bradley Keegan and invited him to the twerp dance. As my Super-PAC will soon make clear, behind that angelic Baptist face was a true redneck Mata Hari, a budding Gennifer Flowers. You see, I was preparing to declare my candidacy for seventh-grade student council, and once it got broadcast around school that I’d been a fool for love and “double dunked for Jesus” at the Baptist youth revival, well, my big ambitions in both love and politics took a sharp turn for the worse.

Which brings us to Woody Futch, the secret bathroom scribbler and my so-called opponent in the aforementioned student-council election. Woody presented himself as a natural leader and a seasoned decision-maker.

Yet as Jim Dandy Super-PAC (which I know absolutely nothing about, need I remind you) will reveal, Woody was the genius solely responsible for using class funds to buy our homeroom teacher Mrs. Motley her special retirement gifts — an emergency road kit and a purple brassiere from Sears and Roebuck — and was known to pick his nose during school assembles. He also inhaled Hostess Sno-Balls and Drake’s Ring Dings like they were coming off the production line.

Out of a sense of honor and fair play I chose not to exploit these questionable factors in Woody’s vita, but that didn’t stop Woody from getting down and dirty — in the process teaching me a valuable lesson about aggressively protecting one’s public image.

To paraphrase Newt Gingrich, or maybe Genghis Khan, running for seventh-grade student council isn’t bean bag, people. Woody not only passed around humiliating photographs of me walking home in wet clothes from the Baptist youth revival, but also revealed how I’d been duped into giving Kathy Crump an expensive mood ring that she promptly gave to Jasmine Tuckahoe, the nastiest girl in the school, who in fact invited me to the twerp dance.

Old Baggage

The outcome wasn’t even close. I lost the election in a rout to a Ring Ding-addicted dude with an old lady underwear fetish. But at least Jasmine and I had a great time.

Next door in South Carolina this week, in advance of yesterday’s all-important Republican Primary, the Super-PACs for all the candidates reportedly spent $30 million trying to destroy each other’s character.

Thanks to these helpful ads — in a state that refined the art of political character destruction, whose current governor, a woman of Indian descent, was called a “rag head” and accused of adultery by a fellow state senator — we learned, in a nutshell, that Mitt Romney pays little or no taxes and loves destroying companies and firing people, Newt Gingrich wants to be the first wife-swapper in the White House, Rick Santorum loves Jesus but hates black people, and Ron Paul is really as crazy as he seems.

Poor Rick Perry gave up and went back to Texas when someone mentioned that as far as South Carolinians were concerned, if the Alamo had had a back door, that state would be speaking “Mexican.”

With a little luck and more Super-PAC advertising, the Republicans may soon have a battle-tested candidate who can stand up to President Obama the way I wish I’d stood up to Woody Futch and Miss Wettington way back when.

According to some reports, Obama’s own Super-PAC (which he has no control over or knowledge of) has raised more than $1 billion dollars in order to mount an unprecedented assault on the character and policies of whichever unfortunate Republican eventually gets the nomination.

In other words, we’re going to have jolly fun all the way to Election Day in November. Don’t blame me. Tell it to the Supreme Court. It’s “people” too.

All I really have to says is, I have no control over the Jim Dandy Super-PAC.

Still, Jasmine, if you happen to read this, wherever you are, could I please have my mood ring back? I’m happily married now, and I wouldn’t want any nasty rumors to get started in case I decide to run for a position on the church summer rummage sale committee.

I’ve got a lot of old baggage to get rid of.

Award-winning author Jim Dodson, Sunday essayist with The Pilot and editor of PineStraw magazine, can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.