but every time i decide to go easy on gary, he posts something so ridiculously wrong, so beyond the pale, that it forces me to action. sometimes it takes him days or even weeks to go too far. this time, it took about six hours.
sometime friday evening, gary stumbled across steph's post from that morning, in which steph alleges that the dickerson campaign has been "feeding libelous allegations and smear tactics to the IndyUndercover site [...] and to Gary Welsh of Advance Indiana". predictably, gary got upset, but i was astonished by what he wrote in response, which i will quote here just in case gary someday decides to edit it (though i suspect he never will):
Steph Mineart at a Commonplace Book thinks that I'm behind IndyUndercover. Of course, she saw me today at the blogger's forum and the professional thing to do would have been to ask me to my face if I was a part of the IndyUndercover blog site. Instead, she posts an outright false assertion stating that Ike Randolph and I have teamed up to do this blogsite. Anyone who knows either of us would know we wouldn't be teaming up together on any project, let alone a political blogsite. I have to say this is the absolute lowest thing any blogger could do to another blogger, but having observed her style for the past year, I have to say I'm not the least bit surprised.
unfortunately for gary, steph didn't say anything of the sort. as i've explained before, she did accuse gary (and, separately, indyundercover) of carrying water for the dickerson campaign, but she certainly didn't claim that gary was "behind indyu" or that he had anything to do with that site. i'm not even sure how he got that from what steph wrote, but i'll be nice and give him the benefit of the doubt that he just misread her and wasn't being intentionally disingenuous.
three different people, including steph and myself, repeatedly tried to explain to gary what steph actually wrote, but he has yet to even acknowledge his error.
i waited all weekend for gary to post an update, a correction, a comment... something acknowledging his flagrant misinterpretation of steph's words. no update came. i posted a comment this morning, directly challenging him to update his post... nothing.
this is the same gary welsh who wrote in a comment to me: "When I make a mistake Stallio, I'm not afraid to own up to it." (he then proceeded to question my masculinity because i blog under a pseudonym, which as i've explained before is not the same as blogging anonymously.) so, gary, when are you going to "be a man" and own up to your mistake? you have every right to be angry about what steph actually wrote without inventing a ludicrous straw man argument to attack her.
i find it the height of irony that gary would go to steph's blog and demand an apology for an accusation that she didn't even make, and yet gary seems unwilling or unable to even acknowledge his own blatantly false accusation against steph. (his accusation being that she made an accusation which she did not in fact make... and he was in the process of making that false accusation when he demanded steph apologize for something she didn't do; i know, it gets a little confusing.)
note also what gary doesn't say: he never actually denies steph's real accusation: that the dickerson campgain has been feeding gary anti-carson smears. does he not deny this because it's true? or because denying this would mean acknowledging that his original reply was totally wrong-headed?
(regardless of whether the dickerson campaign has been directly working with gary, it's hard to deny that advance indiana and indy undercover are repositories of anti-carson mud, based on the commenters alone. those commenters are rabid, and we already know that someone affiliated with the campaign used to comment frequently on tdw. it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest that these forces are still out there commenting on blogs, just covering their tracks better. that said, gary has recently begun deleting comments by jocelyn-tandy accusing carson volunteer wilson allen of felonious conduct, so he does have some kind of standard, however loose it might be.)
then on sunday, when he could have been correcting his faux-pas, he was actively digging up dirt on julia carson. in a lengthy post, he tries to take me to task for referring to "dickerson's failed buick dealership". the delicious irony underlying this screed is that he begins by complaining that i accused him "of slinging mud on behalf of Dickerson", and then proceeds to show off his research skills by cataloguing virtually every negative article that has appeared in the indy star or the defunct news from the past 16 years. (another irony: he constantly whines that carson dared to bring up dickerson's 15-year-old arrest for domestic violence, but he gleefully posts excerpts from even older stories about julia's past businesses.)
of course, "failed buick dealership" were actually jen wagner's words. i had mistakenly guessed that dickerson supporter "someonewhowouldknow" had been posting comments from dickerson's campaign headquarters; jen set me straight that he was in fact posting from the old buick dealership, so i posted a correction. but whatever.
but my question is this: isn't it a failed dealership? it used to be open, but it wasn't profitable so dickerson was forced to sell it off. regardless of whether it failed because of mismanagement or market forces (namely, because the entire buick brand is a huge failure these days, and will probably be dead in a couple years), the fact remains that it was a failure. thus "failed buick dealership" is accurate, no matter how much it might irritate dickerson supporters.¶
Steph Mineart, at
5:26 PM, October 23, 2006
