“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

It’s not just Rhett Butler who has felt that way at least a few times in his life. It was our first reaction when we read former New Hampshire House Speaker Bill O’Brien’s bizarre screed directed at U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte following her former state director’s arrest for solicitation in Nashua this week.

The Facebook post suggested Ayotte should draft a “endorsement / character reference” on David Whiby’s behalf, an obtuse reference to a letter Ayotte co-signed urging New Hampshire Republicans to support Gene Chandler for House Speaker. A few other New Hampshire politcos – former U.S. Rep. Charlie Bass and former House Speaker Donna Sytek among them – caught some shrapnel along the way.

You can read the whole thing yourself, but suffice to say the post was petty, off-topic and small-minded.

Then came the untruths.

The next day, O’Brien followed up with another, longer post and claimed his primary concern was about the “young girls and women who are caught up through drug addiction, violence, and human trafficking in prostitution.” His criticism of Ayotte, he maintained, was actually about her decision to “ignore the human trafficking that her ‘friend’ was so willing to finance.”

O’Brien also claimed that Ayotte’s “poor selection” of a staff member somehow caused a split in the Republican party.

We hardly think so, given that even New Hampshire Republican Party Chairwoman Jennifer Horn criticized O’Brien for his Facebook posting.

“Representative O’Brien’s comments are extremely disappointing and beneath the dignity of his public office,” Horn said in a statement to the New Hampshire Union Leader. “It is wrong to exploit a serious issue in a petty attempt to settle an old political score.”

She’s right.

Nothing more than bitter beans were behind the former speaker’s original post. How is that obvious? Mostly because his original posting mentioned nothing about prostitution, human trafficking, women’s rights, drug addiction or violence against women.

Not once. Not one word. Not even an allusion.

If that’s not clear enough, one of O’Brien’s comments on his first post is when he said Ayotte was “harsh” for offering her opinion on the House speaker race.

“It will be interesting to hear the pleas for party unity coming from those who view party unity as a one-way street,” he wrote.

Even his follow-up post took pot-shots at Ayotte:

“One may be lucky enough to have sufficient intelligence and family support to go to law school, and the luck and talent to be propelled through a variety of government-appointed jobs until money gathers to put you into highest public office, but these advantages, friendships and political maneuvering should never allow one to forget this exploitation,” O’Brien wrote.

It’s as clear as the day is long what’s going on here. The former speaker still hasn’t come to grips with the reality that he is, in fact, the former house speaker and is apparently not above using even the thinnest of threads to make it all about Bill.

It just makes it harder to “give a damn” about anything he says.

And since O’Brien passed on mentioning the human trafficking issue beyond trying to exploit it for his own selfish purposes, allow us:

Information about it can be found at traffickingresourcecenter.org. They also have a toll-free hotline that can be reached by calling 1-888-373-7888.