Are you ready for this?
Are you ready to take a cold, hard look at the plethora of bloggers blasting away on the subject of the race for Pitkin County Sherriff?
In addition to Michael Conniff, there’s Michael Brylawski, Alpha 6, Wharf Rat, Miss Lissa, Kit O’Carra, and PastorMustard, and even candidate Rick Magnuson himself. With the imminent election, now’s the time to look back at some of the highlights:
Where in the world is Sheriff Bob Braudis? A wellness clinic, did you say?
But that doesn’t mean the Sheriff can’t cancel fireworks all the way from Sedona, Arizona, as if he were here in the Roaring Fork Valley the whole time.
One fine day the Pitkin County Sheriff’s office announces the big guy is actually at a wellness clinic, or–as one Pitkin County pol put it–a fat farm.
The good news: Sheriff Bob, lean but not mean, is back on the job.
And he’s not drinking any more, even though he admits to no addiction(s), even though he was at the Desert Canyon Treatment Center for drug and alcohol abuse. No mention is made of drug use.
But local scribes have been missing in action as to his whereabouts. Fortunately, of course, the big city paper in Denver got some reporting done on the real story.
Meanwhile, bloggers started to worry about real crime in the valley that the PitCo Sheriff’s Office might be missing out on.
And then challenger Rick Magnuson finally weighed in on his blog–about making the Sheriff’s office green, of all things, and then he hit much harder with disturbing statistics about DUI fatalities under the reign of Sheriff Bob.
Bloggers galore then began to jump into the debate with both feet, and the discussions took on more and more substance, especially after the story broke about the bust at Campo di Fiore.
The cost of the so-called “War On Drugs” came into play, but then a local paper started to weigh in with the really important news about Magnuson’s masturbation video, and the race went right into the toilet, until bloggers hit back with actual crime statistics in Pitkin County, a pattern of neglect that showed the Sheriff’s Office knows how to look the other way, and one even digressed about the art of politics.
Magnuson, the performance artist and political neophyte still trying to find the higher ground, fought back with more data showing the what-me-worry performance of Sheriff Bob in little things like rape, burglary, drugs, and DUIs. He had his defenders, new and old, but onanism was the only thing on the minds of the local newspapers, one of which literally and proudly admitted their bias to Braudis on the record.
The debate found higher ground of a sort at the “Squirm Night” debate on GrassRoots TV, where the incumbent claimed (wink-wink) he had never taken any drugs while serving as Pitkin County Sheriff, thereby shifting the debate from his drug politics to his credibility.
Yet another blogger staked out the middle ground in the great drug debate, and the Sheriff was tagged, albeit temporarily, by talk of tagging by gangs in Pitkin County.
More news came out about the Sheriff’s drug policy: no arrests of dealers in the last ten years, and a policy to let known dealers go free. But the local papers weighed in with their endorsements of–surprise!–Braudis for reasons of varying weight.
The local papers weighed in with more stories about Magnuson’s performance art and an unfortunate incident with a girlfriend, but there was nothing more to be said by anyone but the Aspen Post bloggers about drugs, a disappearing Sheriff, and a race that had to be seen to be believed.