The Mugging of Boone

Citizens for Change are out with an expensive eight-page, multi-color piece of propaganda masquerading as journalism, "Boone News," which is mainly a recycling of much of the stuff they're already injected into the media bloodstream:

● It's the incumbents' fault there isn't a Target up here, which means Loretta Clawson is personally costing you $1,000-a-year that you could otherwise be saving
● Boone's steep-slope regs are an unnecessary burden (on CFC members)
● The water shortage is (still) a myth
● ASU can get anything it wants from Wilson, Wilcox, Phillips, and Dodson

Along with additional accusations, including the assertion that it is Citizens for Change who've been the VICTIMS of negative campaigning, perpetrated primarily by the author of this blog. Time out while I go

BWAH-HA-HA-HA

This claim of victimhood by the likes of Team Templeton is accompanied by one -- all of ONE -- out-of-context quote from WataugaWatch. Since "Boone News" does not bother to provide a link, allow me. Go here to read what I actually wrote. In making a larger point about the grudge certain developers have against the TOB, I mocked a letter to the editor that was eminently mockable for manufacturing a straw horse. The letter-writer said that the hated progressives on Town Council might deface their own yard signs for political advantage. Riiight.

Otherwise, "Boone News" offers not one example, let alone a single link to a posting on this blog, to prove their allegation that it is I -- not they -- who is practicing the politics of destruction ... perhaps because there aren't any primary postings here to prove that accusation. They make generalizations about what they imagine I've said, NOT about what I've actually written here.

(The hair-brained, over-the-top postings of anonymous snipers in comment threads are not what I'm talking about, including those anonymous nasty comments by CFC supporters and funders. Anonymous posters are actually legally responsible for what they say, despite the illusion of a Cloak of Invisibility shrouding their identities.)

What "Boone News" does NOT reprint in its little eight-page "newspaper" are its character assassinations of Lynne Mason (in particular) that were published in local newspapers. Someone said to us at Farmer's Market last Saturday morning that the attacks on Lynne Mason had made them physically ill. You know you're in the presence of a special kind of malignancy when your stomach churns at the words they utter against good people.

Lynne Mason is one of a handful of ACTUAL Christians that I've been privileged to know (as opposed to all the fake Christians we hear bragging about their personal righteousness on a daily basis), a woman who has worked tirelessly for down-and-out people even as she has worked tirelessly for the general citizenry of the Town of Boone. The people who attacked Lynne Mason in the personal and vicious way she's been attacked are capable of just about anything, including evidently the marvelous fiction of their own victimhood.

There'll be no knowing until after the election how much combined money Templeton and CFC and the four CFC-endorsed candidates have spent to beat Boone into submission. It's obviously way up into the tens of thousands of dollars by now. They've likely spent enough to win an N.C. Senate seat in a metropolitan district. Clearly, they see their commitment of cold hard cash as an investment toward BIG future profits.

We'll also not know until after the election who their hired gun was, what outside political operator they brought in to mastermind the negative attacks and manage the media buys and the targeting. We suspect it'll turn out to be someone like this guy.

In the meantime, if Templeton manages to buy this election, Boone can look forward to government conducted in very much the same vein as this campaign has been waged.