OUR VIEW: Bias lens

Go ahead and shake your head, but not at us or our bias. We wanted to give you a Republican and Democrat voice from each party’s respective conventions. We even had a likely candidate lined up from the Republican Party.
Enter the red tape. Getting into the party was a bit like what we assume it must have been like getting into whatever party Britney Spears attended after her MTV resurrection.
What we mean to say is that no one would talk to us. All we wanted was a feature on a local person. The toughest question we probably would have asked would have been something like top tips for cleaning confetti from a French braid updo. Of course we would have reported it if the person had confessed that she didn’t have all that much fun and that she would have rather been fishing in Hatteras or something of the kind, but that’s not what we were fishing for.
Trouble is we didn’t get the opportunity. The Republican Party, best we can ascertain, sealed the mouths of anyone not given a specific OK to have an open mouth. From several different people we heard that field campaign workers aren’t allowed to speak. They’d be glad, they said, to get us in touch with a person with permission to speak who may or may not be able to locate Wythe County on a map. We explained that that wasn’t really our mission, seeing how we are a local newspaper hoping to interview local people and don’t really care how much someone in Staunton enjoyed the McCain speech. Still, no go. Not just no go, but silence. We called, re-called and then called again. Even when putting together this editorial, we called Republican communication director Gerry Scimeca, hoping be able to explain the muzzle. Somewhere between our call and his return call that we’re sure he intended to make, someone even higher up must have muzzled him.
We understand, maybe, why the Republicans don’t want anyone and everyone talking (though we’d settle for anyone once in a while). On the state level, Delegate Anne B. Crockett-Stark ran into trouble with free talking (at least on blogs and Facebook profiles) Republican staffers not once but twice. In 2005, a staff member blogged about the rednecks in and around Wythe County. She disparaged the voters, saying the people in this region are tattooed freak shows and made some obligatory references to “Deliverance.” Two years later, Crockett-Stark had the misfortune to again draw a worker who talked too much about things better left unsaid, insinuating that Crockett-Stark referred to fundraising and excrement head raising, or a synonym thereof.
Still, we believe it’s better to take your chances and let people speak their minds and hearts. For anything embarrassing you might hush up, you wind up with a very out-of-touch looking, monolithic beast. Republicans have fine-tuned the ability to play the victim, beaten up by a bloody-toothed press. Don’t believe this time when they complain of media bias. It’s not our fault they didn’t want to play the game.
The top-down, non-responsiveness we’ve seen this week is part of the reason – though not the main reason – why former Gov. Jim Gilmore doesn’t have a prayer of defeating former Gov. Mark Warner for the John Warner Senate seat. The Democrats seemed to have put it together that you end up looking better not trying so hard to be absolutely certain that you won’t look bad.
Republicans, meet irony.
And that’s why there isn’t a Republican view of St. Paul, Minn., in today’s paper.