“I’ve had a target on my back since I got in,” Joe Biden says of his campaign for president, and that’s certainly true – metaphorically, at least – of almost anyone running for public office, especially frontrunners. All their opponents are going to follow the leaders and snipe at them.
The one thing a candidate doesn’t want to do is make that target bigger, which is what Biden has done repeatedly for decades. He’s his own worst enemy.
You don’t have to run for office to experience this unpleasant phenomenon. Any business owner can testify to the pains taken to avoid being targeted: for theft of property or proprietary information, bootlegging, trademark infringements, lawsuits, bad press, etc.
Can you imagine a business owner painting a target on his own back? That would be like launching a nationwide chain of discount retail outlets and calling it Target, with a target as its logo. Crazy, right?
Needless to say, like other successful businesses, Target gets targeted on a regular basis, most recently by a Houston shopper who claims to have injured herself on August 3, 2019 when she ran into a “colorful object” protruding from a store shelf.
Why didn’t she see this protruding colorful object? Because it was “camouflaged” by other colorful objects. The problem, apparently, was that the store was too much like a store, what with all the colorful objects camouflaging each other. You’d almost have to be looking where you’re going to avoid them all.
So, since it was obviously not her fault that she didn’t notice the colorful object, Jerri Mester filed suit against the aptly-named Target in Harris County District Court more than a year after the fateful incident.
To represent her in court, Mester hired Landon Keating, a Houston attorney with a target on his back, one he may have painted on himself when he got caught for allegedly secretly recording a female coworker using the bathroom.
Maybe next time she goes to Target, Mester should take Keating with her so he can keep an eye on things.