Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Gotta Love This Place

So the link doesn't expire, I'm pasting below the entire text of a story that appears in today's Times. Apparently, a local weekly paper based near Crawford, Texas -- home of the Moron Ranch -- has had the nerve to endorse that other guy who's not Bush. So, what have some local residents done?? Read the paper's endorsement and consider whether the editors might have a point? Say, "I disagree, I believe W is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and intend to vote for him several times, including in Florida and Pennsylvania, but I respect your contrary opinion, what with free press, free speech, etc. etc.?" No, instead, they've started a boycott of the paper which has cut subscriptions in half, has resulted in all of the paper's distributors in Crawford refusing to carry it, and brought about threats of "physical harm." Brilliant!!

There must be something in the water. But a co-worker of mine sent an email suggesting that, to combat the ignorance apparently rampant in that part of Texas, supporters -- of Kerry and/or the First Amendment -- purchase a 6 month subscription to the paper (The Lone Star Iconoclast - I shit you not) for the princely sum of $22.50. I think it's a fine idea. I'll be paying for it with my Bush tax cut.

October 13, 2004 HOMETOWN POLITICS
Sure, Country Is Divided, but Bush Country, Too?B y RALPH BLUMENTHAL
CRAWFORD, Tex., Oct. 8 - And you think the country is polarized?
The folks at Security Bank of Crawford, the Yellow Rose and the Red Bull (souvenir shops, not bars), and the Fina filling station where farm elders commune over coffee at dawn in the "Room of Knowledge," are strongly for President Bush, the Republican favorite son whose ranch put tiny, boozeless Crawford on the world map.

Mayor Robert Campbell, a Democrat, is for Senator John Kerry, which has not stopped him from trying to snare the Bush presidential papers for nearby Baylor University when Mr. Bush leaves office - this January, Mr. Campbell hopes. A local weekly newspaper, The Lone Star Iconoclast, living up to its name, has also declared for Mr. Kerry, paying a steep price in canceled subscriptions and hate mail.

The Crawford Peace House across the tracks - well, it is officially nonpartisan but it is hardly partial to the commander in chief of the Iraq war.

For a quiet country crossroads (population 735) near Waco, the place billing itself as "the hometown of our 43rd president" is not immune from the scorched-earth politics roiling the nation less than a month before Election Day.

"What we did was like slapping their mother," said Nathan Diebenow, 25, one of four - oops, make that three - staff writers on The Iconoclast, whose collaborative Sept. 29 editorial, "Kerry Will Restore American Dignity," set off a furor here, quickly crashing the paper's Web site (iconoclast-texas.com) with 6,496 hits, far more than the normal 250 a day. "The more reasons we gave," Mr. Diebenow said, "the worse it was." A fourth staff member listed on the masthead, David Anderson, associate editor, has dissociated himself from the editorial, said Michael Harvey, spokesman for the editor in chief, W. Leon Smith.

The newspaper, which endorsed Mr. Bush in 2000, faulted him for "a hidden agenda" that it said included emptying the Social Security trust fund, cutting Medicare, veterans benefits and military pay and involving the country in "a deadly and highly questionable war."
"He let us down," the newspaper said.

Mr. Smith, 51, the Iconoclast's snowy-bearded majority owner and fervid Ronald Reagan admirer, said in his cluttered office in nearby Clifton that all three of the newspaper's outlets in Crawford had stopped selling it and that a readers' boycott had cut newsstand and subscription sales to 482 copies a week from 920.

In a note to readers in the Oct. 6 issue, he also said, "Unfortunately, for The Iconoclast and its publishers there have been threats - big ones including physical harm." (The newspaper's namesake was a Waco publication revived in 1895 by William Cowper Brann, an ornery rabble-rouser who, upon being mortally shot in the back by an outraged Baylor University partisan, managed to kill his assailant in return. "I certainly don't want to end up that way," Mr. Smith said.)

The newspaper's Web site reported that 700 letters had poured in, pro and con, and that nearly 100 people had opened new subscriptions.

Joyce Smith, who works at the Fina station, where the newspaper has been pulled off the stands, was adamant. "Everybody has freedom of expression," she said, "but there are repercussions."
She and others in town complained that Mr. Smith had chosen to foist his views in the special issue devoted to the Tonkawa Traditions Festival, the annual Crawford fair, named for an Indian tribe, which raises money for community improvements and scholarships. "He took advantage of the advertisers," Ms. Smith said.

To "dispel the rumor that the town backed Kerry," 128 individual and commercial supporters of President Bush took out a two-page advertisement on Oct. 7 in another weekly, The McGregor Mirror, declaring that they "wholeheartedly endorse" him for re-election.

Mr. Campbell, 61, a Methodist pastor who has been mayor since 1999, said he saw the momentum shifting to Mr. Kerry. "I think a lot of people are looking seriously to switch to his side," he said. Of course, the businessmen were Republicans, he said.

"They're for Bush," he said of the stores on either side of his small municipal office on the main street. "The bank's for Bush, the Yellow Rose is for Bush. When you think about it, business is for Bush. He helps them." Still, he said, it would be a boon to Crawford to get the Bush papers for Baylor rather than Texas A&M University in College Station, Southern Methodist University in Dallas or Texas Tech in Lubbock.

"I may be a Democrat and support a Democratic candidate," he said, "but I'm also for the welfare of the community." (Baylor is also Mayor Campbell's alma mater.)

Clearly, with the overwhelming support of Crawford voters in his race against Al Gore in 2000, Mr. Bush, who bought his 1,600-acre ranch just west of town in 1999, is the favorite here. Yes, said Larry Nelson, manager of Crawford Country Style, visitors to his Bush-themed shop may include Kerry supporters, but, he added with a comic's pause that drew appreciative hoots from customers, "they don't mention it."

The frontier-town-like strip of once-abandoned stores brim with Republican knickknacks, many with an official-looking presidential seal marked "Western White House." Country Style featured mock Western movie posters for "The Last of the Clintons." A few doors down, the Yellow Rose, festooned with Bush-Cheney banners, serenaded customers with a pro-Bush ballad to the tune of "You're the Top." ("Vote for Bush/On November 2/Get off Your Tush/Let Your Choice be Reckoned.") It also offered a George Bush talking doll for $23.97 that says things like this: "It's not the pollution that's harming our environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it"; and "I understand small-business growth. I was one."

"The Secret Service gets a kick out of it when they come in here," a sales clerk said.
Shopkeepers say that while the president normally bypasses the stores for security reasons, only dropping in periodically at Crawford's sole restaurant, the Coffee Station, his proximity has been good for business. At the Main Street Place, Joe Cuff said he had seen 175,000 visitors in the three years his wife's store had been open and he marked their hometowns on a world map peppered with sticky red dots.

But like the country at large, there are gradations of support for Mr. Bush. In the deserted Di-An-Tiques & Things, by a wall painted with a stirring flag mural invoking "The Spirit of America," the owner, Diane Binnion, watched a televangelist and bemoaned a lack of business. "It's a little slow," she said, "not the traffic we used to have." She attributed it to "gas prices and all the gloom and doom." But she said, "I'm going to support him, no matter what. I'd be scared if it went the other way."

At the Crawford Peace House, which opened last year and in July sponsored a thronged outdoor showing of Michael Moore's anti-Bush film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," Joshua Collier, the resident volunteer, said townsfolk had dropped the "one finger wave" and derisive yells, growing accepting if not fully welcoming. "This space," he said, "helps to prove that civil discussion is still possible."