The "Beer Storm" gone wrong

Yes, I attended the previously unheard-of face-to-face encounter between the tireless, under-appreciated people that drive the local poliblogging scene and the multitude of folks that simultaneously love and hate them--the candidates, the elected and those paid quite handsomely to shamelessly promote them no matter what. And yes, I’m rightfully embarrassed to admit as much.

Here’s the link:

Candidates meet the faces behind the screen names

Gort deserves some major kudos for making this improbably gathering of oft-colliding political planets to happen at all. I know the Citizens’ Voice story lists Gort and Joe Valenti of Pittston Politics as equally guilty co-conspirators in this instance, but Gort reaches out statewide on a continual basis, while Joe seems to be limited to covering all things dominated by Italians, i.e., Pittston (a long-forgotten third-class city not frequented very often by the smarter folks) and the thoroughly forgettable boroughs on it’s nondescript periphery.

Gort, I think you either outdid yourself, or the large crowd in attendance last night serves as a testament to your growing Internet popularity.

Personally, while I did enjoy myself for the most part, there was much that I did not enjoy.
For instance, a county commissioner who stood eye-to-eye with me for damn near a half hour, but who did not have the testicular fortitude necessary to confront me about my many scathing comments written about his “See no evil, hear no evil” performance while “serving” under the rotunda dome, while the county has for, for lack of a getter term, gone insolvent.

And now he wants us to send him to Harrisburg to fulfill the duties of a do-nothing Lieutenant Governor? Do-nothing? Sounds eerily familar.

Fat chance.

And once again, as evidenced by the reporting, I was burned by the media.

Not that I have a problem with the Citizens’ Voice’s Elizabeth Skrapits. I talked to her at length out on the sidewalk while we enjoyed (yes, enjoyed) a cigarette. She’s smart, well-versed on the breaking issues of the day, totally likeable, and cute to boot. I could hang out with her without an invite. I mean that.

And, boy, is she well-versed on the still developing Marcellus Shale drilling boondoggle. I pointed her in the direction of one Kayak Dude, a self-avowed and tirelessly persistent tree-hugger she claimed to have already met.

But, as is always the case, when talking with the people that rush to print, expect them to use only your most provocative comments. This wasn’t my first brush with them. You’d think I’d know that by now, to not come off as being controversial, judgmental or skeptical belong all belief.

And I reiterate, I have nothing her, or with anything she reported. To be perfectly honest, she was someone I could share a few beers with. But I did say what she published: “Basically, they just want to use us.”

They, the candidates and their staffers, were looking for some cheap and adoring press.
And I’m still shaking my fattened head at West Pittston Mayor Bill Goldsworthy‘s mystifyingly weird attributed quote: “…he came ‘to meet the people behind the screen names‘."

Um, like Joe Valenti, Mark Cour, Steve Albert, David Yonki and Tom Borthwick? Those people hiding the behind the proverbial curtain?

What?

Are we still sticking with that long-misguided notion that political bloggers are too, too completely afraid to reveal their true identities?

Stick a fork in him…he’s done and permanently grounded in West Pittston. Right where he belongs.

I do have enhanced respect for Dr. Joe Leonardi, who made it a point to chit-chat with me, even though I had once severely rebuked, in print, his for-profit weight-loss program. You have to admire a guy who can suffer the sting of your very pointed arrows, and then glad-hand with you afterwards.

It’s an outright shame what the Republican party did to him by withholding any and all financing when he sought to the topple the most arrogant and self-serving congressman this side of California…Paul Kanjorski.

Thank you, Joe.

And to be perfectly blunt, I have to wonder, once again, about the now-questionable courage of upstart, bomb-throwing bloggers who openly fantasize about your physical and violent undoing in electronic print, but then shy away from you when the rubber meets the road.

Dude, you either have swollen gonads, or you do not.

Work on that.

I do feel bad about bugging out of there the way I did, but that live band, that was just too much to for me bare for very much longer. That was too much to ask of any self-respecting fan of music and the folks who craft such things.

Now, let’s cover the exploits of the reporter from the Times Leader who quizzed me at length about my blogging pursuits, past and present. He claimed that his newspaper is going to do some kind of in-depth story about the local blogosphere. Coming soon, I was told.

And that’s all well and good. And while he was cordial and all, he really struggled with the spelling of this site’s title, namely, the first word in that goofy, ill-advised title…”circumlocution.”
Now, allow me to get this perplexing development straight.

He’s the acclaimed journalist and I’m the trainee, the hopeful wannabe purported to be wallowing away in my pajamas? Whatever.

Cir-cum-loc-ution!

Sound it out, for Allah‘s sake.

And Wilkes-Barre Mayor Tom Leighton awarded me with my third city-themed hat pin. And, true to my nature, I had to bust his stones by pointing out that, while I’ve unequivocally supported him for six or seven years on end, all that I‘ve received for my troubles is these 3 hat pins.

But I'm all good with that.

I told John Yudichak flat-out that a vote for him coming from me would be a vote to keep my current mayor well-grounded right here in Wilkes-Barre. And after he chuckled, he said, “I can live with that.”

And I also asked him what happened to the persistent “heir apparent” rumor whereas his long-expected ascendancy would one day unseat Congressman Paul Kanjorski.

He said he has “3 beautiful daughters,” and he would rather serve the likes of us as well as his daughters from Harrisburg, rather than from the more distant Washington D.C.
I can respect that.

Anyway, in conclusion, this will probably the very last event of these sorts that I will ever attend. Hanging out with bloggers, like-minded and otherwise, sounds like a doable plan. Idiots all, no?

But openly courting the oft-meandering and always hollow affection of the political hopefuls, the well-entrenched hierarchy and the summoned, attending press is not something that makes me feel as if I have any last vestiges of credibility intact.

I mean that not as an indictment of any of the organizers of, or the folks who excitedly attended this well-attended event. More pointedly, I mean that more as a statement that immediately followed much introspection on my part.

If what they’re looking for is positive press, they should try earning it, rather than counting on it simply because they made a big fuss over me.

Ain’t no big thing.

Later