The Star Tribune finally managed to get a story in about Minneapolis School Board member-elect Chris Stewart’s “Tammy Lee and Everyone Who Supports Her Hate Black People” web site.
They couldn’t get the story in before the election for some reason, probably because, as they said, Stewart didn’t return their call until after the election.
I spoke to Stewart on Monday, though, which I guess means the Strib should hire me to replace Steve Brandt, their school board man.
Brandt didn’t go into much detail on the story of course, because, after all, the Strib had to leave plenty of room for Katherine Kersten to tell us again how wonderful Michele Bachmann is. But I so admire his apparently pungent questioning of Stewart–which elicited this response: “It breaks down to some frat-blog type humor that never was meant to get out to the public and it’s completely inconsistent with my politics.”
Some questions I might have asked: “Stewart, what you really mean is it wasn’t supposed to be revealed that you wrote it. Right?” and, “Since you did write it, how can you say it’s inconsistent with your politics?” and, “If we accept your explanation that it was frat boy humor, how do you think the citizens of Minneapolis ought to feel about having just elected someone of such awesome intellect?” and “Would you have returned my phone call if I had left the message that we were going to run a front page story on Election Day that exposes you as the author of patently racist diatribe and we wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself?”
A question Brandt might ask his own editorial board is, “What sort of research did you do on this guy before we endorsed him?”
And he might ask his own editor “Why do you tolerate an excuse at the level of ‘He didn’t return my phone call?’ for not getting this story to the voters?”
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