You're a bunch of pseudo-journo-wonks who write for Seattle's alternative, alternative, Sandinista weekly - The Stranger.
It's Election Night 2004. A Tuesday, of course, dammit. Your deadline day. A bunch of you are out on the town, "working" and drinking very heavily.
Or so the storyline goes.
And gosh, wouldn't ya just know it? Things aren't turning out quite so well. Florida, Ohio, etc.
Worse, you've got to file a staff-written piece pronto (front page teaser, "Drunkin Electoin Night Repurt"), without knowing for absolute sure just how things will turn out by Thursday, when your uber-hip, sex worker ad-laden fishwrap hits the streets.
So, you produce this piece of timeless, yet somewhat inchoate socio-cultural anthropology, sure to to forever grace the digital archives of drunken Democratic despair.
But I know you were all really sippin' herbal tea, and nibbling Fig Newmans. While channeling the imagined bar-rat angst of soused Kerry-phile losers, who - in actuality - did the real heavy lifting that ignominious evening.
Word is, several of you are actually closet Rs. And the edgy "progressive" shtik is just a marketing ploy.
You've got an image to maintain, and serve a useful function in this constipated burg. So.....I won't out The Closeted Republicans Who Run The Stranger.
No, no.
Not yet, anyway.
Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 5, 2004 12:29 AM
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The week prior, the lead political reporter for The Stranger wrote a piece talking about how much the Kerry campaign "owed" Howard Dean. Maybe this person is a closet Republican? The Kerry campaign owes Howard Dean nothing. Many folks struggled to try to keep alive those meet-ups the Dean campaign started, which seemed more akin to graduate level seminars on politics than solid meetings on how to win. Maybe The Stranger means well. But how seriously can one take a paper that actually believes the monorail represents a serious transportation alternative and its inflated values on vehicles for tax revenue aren't criminally incompetent governance?
Posted by: Terry Parkhurst at November 5, 2004 09:50 PMMatt, brilliant once again. And I just want to add, I hope the site moveon.org is getting a lot of hits this week from Blue States.... because, honestly.. they should move on.
Posted by: bmvaughn at November 6, 2004 08:40 AMAt long last, the Democratic operatives are starting to see that they are slowly descending into minority party status. It seems that they are in the same situation that the Republicans found themselves in during the 1930's. They are united mostly by their hatred of the chief executive; they lack connectiveness to the body politic and they are nearly devoid of vision. They are fighting battles that were mostly or completely won. The first president with Black members of his cabinet is George Bush.
It amazes me that the party faithful of today are most often operatives of the 1960's, and they view the world through the prism of the Vietnam era. They want us to choose to lose the war in Iraq, just as the we chose to lose the war in Vietnam. That is their unspoken but obvious motivation; the American People are uncomfortable with that choice, especially when we realize what its consequences are.
Posted by: Howard Wolf at November 6, 2004 01:27 PMIn regards to The Stranger, this rag is just the sort of hipster, too cool for words, kind of paper which actually helps Bush and company.
Back in 2000 Dan Savage wrote a piece where he encouraged Stranger readers to register as Republicans so that they could vote for John McCain. Savage's strange logic held that Gore would easily crush Bush in the general election. Dan Savage told The Stranger readers that they should do whatever they could to help Bush clinch the nomination! I am not B.S.ing, go back and read the article.
In another weird as hell and utterly wrong piece, Savage stated that the war in Iraq was justified because we would be bringing Western values to a backward Islamic nation. Maybe Savage is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute? Perhaps Scaife is paying for those bizarre two page inserts which equates both Bush and Kerry as the opposing forces of Lucifer?
Despite it's too cool and all knowing attitude The Stranger has continually shown poor political judgement.
Posted by: Conrad McMasters at November 7, 2004 10:02 PMNot big on proof reading are they??? LOL. Usually I just ignore the typos and spelling errors....but this was really something else!
Once you get past all that of course, you realize they are just a cheap 'copycat' of the Berkeley Barb....YAWN......
It's the 'hipper-than-thou' line of thinking.