The Try-Works

Years of being told Vincent Carroll’s cock is six inches long.

Dan Caplis’ tongue smells just like Vincent Carroll’s shit.

Sorry, but who could resist? Anyway, as unkind as we have been to 5280 on occasion, now and then Jason Bane gets it really fucking right.

If you’ve never heard of Joseph Michelli, you’re not alone — neither had I until last week — so perhaps the Colorado Springs talk radio host is trying to change that. That’s the only excuse I can think of for making a fool of himself on the radio recently, and then issuing a half-assed apology to make up for it.

Last week, Michelli told both of his listeners that people who earn the minimum wage are “dumb and incompetent.” I’m not sure what point he was trying to make, but the comment came during a discussion about Amendment 42, a November ballot initiative that seeks to raise the Colorado minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $6.85 per hour. Perhaps he believes that dumb and incompetent people aren’t worthy of earning more money than $5.15 per hour. Nevermind that Michelli proved without a doubt that you can be dumb and incompetent and earn more than the minimum wage, but that’s a different argument.

Michelli’s idiotic remark was bad enough, but his apology was worse. He told his audience yesterday that he was sorry, but then said that he meant the statement to be a “sort of rhetorical question.”

What’s wrong with just saying, “I’m sorry,” and leaving it at that? Saying that minimum wage earners are “dumb and incompetent” is an insult. It’s not a question, or a metaphor, or a haiku. It’s an insult.

Here’s another rhetorical question for Michelli: You’re a jerk.

The rest.

It’s been awhile since we’ve poked at Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Ernesto Vigil and all the rest of the sadsack rapists and murderers who’re in such demand over at KHOW in the interest of discrediting Ward Churchill.

But there’s no time like the present, and hell, we’re feeling randy this morning.

The following from the first of a two part interview with John Trudell, entitled “Who Killed Annie Mae.”

ICT: The implication of AIM leadership involvement in her execution surfaced publicly certainly by the 1980s.

Trudell: Well, when Arlo’s story started coming out is when I heard it directly, in 1988. I heard it when Arlo told me about it; but when I look back at the story that Arlo told, it became obvious to me early that this whole trail of decision-making on the killing of Annie Mae could possibly lead to somebody within the AIM leadership. And I found it interesting that the government didn’t pursue that - I wondered why the government, after so much persecution of AIM, just didn’t get on that one and pursue it. Now, they’ve got all these mandates and attempts to discredit AIM leadership, to attack AIM leadership, and here is the hottest possible case - why wait 25 years to make the accusations?

I would suggest this is on purpose. It is because trails go cold, evidence is lost, people forget; you know, putting distance between the event and when they went to deal with it. Over time, things are more easily rearranged. So we can see that through the years there have been close to a half-dozen grand juries about this and nothing was ever actively pursued beyond that. And so, I think that as time has passed the government is resurrecting the case now to try to just lay it at AIM, at the folks in AIM that their extended personnel was able to agitate and manipulate.

ICT: You feel they didn’t fully investigate it before?

Trudell: Not aggressively. And there were no indictments. For some reason, they would get shut down or go away or whatever. And that had been the history of it until this last and present round when they indicted John Boy and Arlo Looking Cloud and took Arlo to trial and convicted him. Now they are going after John Boy, who has fought it from Canada.

I say this is interesting now because if John Boy gets extradited back and stands trial, then I think that it creates a real opportunity to find out very specifically and exactly who is behind Annie Mae’s murder. Because no matter what role John Boy Graham may or may not have played in this, he was never the order-giver. And Arlo was never the order-giver. These were not the people who gave the orders. These are the people that we can allege were following the orders.

The rest.

Am I getting through to you?

(Thanks to Erin Rosa, who points out that we needn’t worry as the disease only kills the old and the senile.)

Serial bigot Both Ways Bob, is just about getting his ass whupped. Not the we particularly give a shit about the outcome, in that as far as we can tell the rest of the candidates are infuckingseparable from Mr. Beauprez on every issue we care about. But hell, we like watching any of them come apart at the seams.

Then yesterday came word about his “70 percent of African-American women have abortions” statement. He later apologized for not getting the statistic correct, apparently oblivious to the point that he sounded like a racist boob — whether he had the right number or not.

Beauprez just sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or even what he should be doing. He looks like the popular jock in school who can’t understand why all of the kids aren’t voting for him for prom king, because isn’t the popular jock supposed to be prom king? He’s been running around the state waiting for governor to happen to him. Well, it isn’t happening to him, and now he’s starting to become a joke. Rollie Heath became a joke by mid-August when he ran against Bill Owens in 2002. When too many people start repeating the line, “He can’t win,” then it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perception is reality in politics, and the perception is becoming dark for Beauprez.

The rest.

We’ve been watching this latest dipshit racist offering from Mr. Beauprez unfold, and just haven’t found a way to frame it properly, mainly because it’s such fucking nonsense. We can’t seem to dig deep enough into the sloppy shitpot of his brain to figure out what the fuck he’s trying to say. That black women are sluts? Murderous sluts? That welfare mothers make better lovers?

Any way you look at it, Mr. Beauprez seems to spend way too many nights burning lean tissue into the wee hours of the morn, contemplating the sexual habits of women of color with an intensity akin to that of John Mark Karr masturbating on a picture of JonBenet.

(Or Peter Boyles, come to think.)

As he manages to soak this non-story for another week or so of inflated ratings, doing what he does best: breaking his own back trying to give himself the world’s longest blow-job.

But regardless, it’s over. And the locals are feeling a wee bit vindictive this morning.

But, anyway, dear reader, here is the sort of thing you might have found in a real newspaper over the last week or so, did you not live in a backwater cowtown with a pair of newspapers seemingly staffed by Weekly World News rejects.

We think Ms. Lacy might not be entirely to blame in this debacle. Call us unconvinced that the story merited the fucking front page treatment from the get-go. Even if it had been a story at all.

Anyway, upon finishing the article, do try not to break into tears as a sudden remembrance of the horseshit piffle that rules the pages of the Post and the Rocky washes over you.

All JonBenet! All the time! Until the next non-news comes along!

Here’s a note to Messrs. Temple and Moore: there’s a reason your circulation’s going down faster than Vincent Carroll at an all boys’ summer camp. (Look into those eyes and tell me you’d let him alone with your children.) You’re fucking irrelevant. The news you cover ain’t, and you consistantly even manage to find entirely new ways to fuck that up.

So we’re gloating our ass off.

(And none too soon. We were almost at the point of finding another sexy, white, rich six-year-old to to throttle in hopes of shutting these dipshits the fuck up.)

So that we might avoid the stifling conflicted feeling we get in our throat every time we laugh out loud at one his columns?

Like say, the headline to this skewering of the local’s John Mark Karr coverage.

We just wish he’d included bloggers in his wrap. We can think of at least one shitheel who has been humping this corpse with a fervor that’d make Peter Boyles and John Temple turn in their NAMDGA cards in awe.*

There was never any danger of the Rocky Mountain News underplaying the August 16 arrest of alleged child-porn fan John Mark Karr in the 1996 slaying of JonBenét Ramsey. After all, the paper’s previous coverage of this tragic episode had exhibited all the quiet subtlety of Celine Dion at a wineglass-shattering contest. But somehow, the tabloid’s August 17 front page still managed to startle thanks to an enormous color head-and-shoulders shot of JonBenét looking like a miniature bride in a frilly white dress, pre-Raphaelite curls, elaborate makeup, smoochy red lipstick and a come-hither expression she didn’t grow old enough to understand. If Karr hadn’t been in custody in Thailand, he might have been accused of another crime: serving as the Rocky’s art director for the day.

Inside, the Rocky outlined Karr’s capture and the role played by CU-Boulder journalism professor Michael Tracey, who conducted a lengthy e-mail correspondence with the alleged murderer before contacting the authorities. (Somehow, the paper neglected to mention that Tracey was once on the Rocky’s payroll; he wrote the worst media column since the invention of moveable type for the tabloid during parts of 2003 and 2004.) Even Lisa Ryckman, a former Ramsey specialist turned fitness editor, got into the act. Ryckman’s collection of vindicatory comments from friends of Patsy Ramsey, JonBenét’s mother, was her first article in ages that didn’t run alongside pictures of her wearing Danskin.

Still, perhaps the most telling moment in the Rocky’s blizzard of JonBenét ballyhoo was its editorial on the topic, which juxtaposed warnings against rushing to judgment (yeah, sure) with a nyaah-nyaah-nyaah aimed at those who felt the paper had bent over for the Ramseys back in the day. “The record will show that this newspaper attempted to explore all possible explanations for the murder, including the theory of outside intruder,” the editorial’s author wrote. “As a result of those efforts, the paper was contemptuously dubbed ‘The Ramsey Mountain News’ by one fierce media critic of the family. This fellow also targeted a News reporter for regular on-air ridicule.”

By the way, the “critic” was KHOW’s Peter Boyles, and the “News reporter” was Ryckman, who wrote in a 2000 letter to Westword that she refused to appear on an episode of Geraldo Rivera’s show with Boyles “out of sheer disgust.” Betcha that deflated Rivera’s ego. Usually people who dodge Geraldo’s program do so because they’re sickened by him.
These days, Boyles continues to earn revulsion, but for a different reason. Since the Karr bust, he’s been bombarded by angry calls and e-mails demanding that he apologize for unfairly persecuting Patsy, yet he’s refused to do so thus far; he says the Karr confession “doesn’t add up.” His fellow yakkers may agree, but most took a safer path — at least in the beginning. KHOW’s Craig Silverman initially offered an I’m-sorry for using “innuendo” against Patsy and her husband, John, while Silverman’s partner, Dan Caplis, pussyfooted around previous statements about Patsy’s possible complicity by arguing that he never definitively said she was guilty. But as more doubts began creeping in, their skepticism increased, along with that of many other observers, who began probing every clue anew. During the afternoon drive on August 16, for instance, KOA’s April Zesbaugh rapped about “contusions” on JonBenét’s vagina and the question about whether the young victim had been “penetrated.” No word on how many crashes her conversation caused.

The rest.

* North American Man Dead Girl Association

All Ramsey all the time, baby.

We really fucking hate being in the awkward position of defending Peter Boyles, but in fact, we must. Yes, Boyles is a perfect example of the lowest form of human life: the smear tactician as journalist, crushing voices of dissent and maintaining the local media’s focus on the basest kind idiot celebrity worship and race-bating, but the fact remains that he ain’t exceptional.

He’s only one example of kind which, in case you ain’t noticed, we think is as easily found in the halls of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as over at the KHOW building.

But anyway, as we noted Friday, the local papers have been contorting themselves like a Bangkok twelve-year-old on a Rocky editorial staff retreat to wiggle out from under their own lynchmob reporting of the Ramsey case (and, yes, Vinnie, that most specifically includes your rag), and they’ve latched on to Peter Boyles as their scapegoat.

Including this from the Denver Post:

Most media outlets took care to approach this week’s wrinkle with proper skepticism.

Still, the coverage continues to blur the lines dividing old-line media, web chatterers and the punditocracy. Which is your pleasure: Nancy Grace, Peter Boyles and the Drudge Report? Or the New York Times, BBC Radio, and the “CBS Evening News”?To many consumers, the opinions spouted on cable TV and radio and the web are not so different from traditional journalism, not least because of the history of reporting on the Ramseys.
As the bottom dwellers on the media food chain spread speculation and theories from unnamed sources, the establishment media often follow their leads, sometimes arriving at the same specifics.

The rest.

As well as these two cartoons from the Rocky Mountain News’ Ed Stein: here and here.

And the following letter, which made it into the Rocky at something like the speed of fucking light:

There ought to be a law against Boyles’ tactics

Unfortunately, not everything criminal is against the law. Take, for instance, Peter Boyles’ egocentric, obsessive, arrogant and mean-spirited crucifixion of Patsy Ramsey, his desire to repeal the presumption of innocence in her case and to replace the court system with himself as the judge of her innocence. That was clearly criminal, but, unfortunately, not against the law.

Or is it? If there isn’t, there ought to be a law against trying to gain popularity and “readership” by assuming infallibility and inflicting severe pain on top of severe pain. In a more perfect world, Boyles would spend the rest of his days listening to talk shows rather than hosting them. Or maybe, Mr. Boyles, we have no business assuming that the suspect is guilty just because he has confessed to being guilty, right? (”Big breakthrough in JonBenet case,” Aug. 17.)

I cannot imagine the horror of losing a child and then being wrongly accused of murdering her, an accusation that ghouls like Boyles insisted should dog Patsy Ramsey for the rest of her days.

Jerry Lyons
Westminster

The rest.

And, of course, a column by Vincent Carroll, which seemed to particularly piss off Peter Boyles:

The answer is no. Peter Boyles won’t apologize or express regret for his 10-year trashing of John and Patsy Ramsey. “There are too many holes” in the John Karr story, Boyles told his KHOW radio listeners Thursday. Boyles is going to sit tight and see how the latest chapter unfolds.

In the short term, Boyles took the only option open to him. He’s too far out on a limb to dance back at the first sign of a dangerous gale. The wind might subside. Karr may turn out to be a deluded fraud. Just how will prosecutors tie him to all the peculiar details of the JonBenet crime scene if they don’t nail him outright with a DNA match?

And if Karr is convicted?

Over and over on Thursday, Boyles insisted he’ll be as happy as anyone if that occurs.

“I hope he’s the guy who did it.”

“I hope to hell he is the killer.”

“If this is the guy, that’s terrific. That’s wonderful.”

But it would not be terrific for anyone who spent years accusing another person of the crime. To the contrary, it would be terrible. It would mean an innocent woman had been falsely accused of committing perhaps the most heinous offense possible: the killing of her own child.

Fear of such mistakes helps explain why most journalists, no matter how much they relish pointing out the odd, implausible or even self-incriminating behavior of a felony suspect, stop short of stating their personal conclusions regarding guilt or speculating openly on how the crime went down.

Boyles, whose mastery of JonBenet crime trivia may be unequaled outside of law enforcement, is not burdened with such reluctance - on this or other crimes. Even as he was digesting the startling news from Bangkok, Boyles let fly with a passing judgment of the Aarone Thompson case, where the parents’ behavior also raised suspicions.

“We know who did that,” he quipped, before quickly sliding in a qualifier.

Because of course we don’t know “who did that.” Any more than we have ever known who killed JonBenet.

The rest.

And that was only the beginning. Because about 8:15 AM Friday morning, anyone listening to the Peter Boyles show got the best fifteen fucking minutes of radio since Ward Churchill called Mike Rosen a revolutionary. You see, Vincent Carroll called in to defend himself, and Peter Boyles went ballistic, blasting Carroll for his paper’s relationship with Channel 9, for not bothering with basic journalism, and for being a fucking hypocrite.

Our favorite quotes from Peter Boyles?

“Vince, you’re an idiot.”

“Hey, Vince, grow a pair.”

“Vince, you have a mind, use it.”

To his credit, Vinnie did try to hold his own, calling Boyles a “conspiracy monger” and pointing out that he might ought to adhere to some of those basic tenets of ethical journalism, like not lynching people in the public arena.

Pot, kettle.

And as you’d expect from these two, it started into whining after first few minutes, with Carroll rejecting Boyles’ friendship, and Boyles pulling a pose of mock hurt. Regardless, Boyles was fucking masterful, keeping Carroll on the line well past the point where Carroll should have known better, and slapping him around like, well, a ninety-eight pound weakling with Chronic Racist Wasting Away Disease. But the conversation finally ended with Carroll hanging up, his voice all tearful with the regrets of love lost.

(Unfortunately, of course, there was a callback, with the two fucking up all our amusement with a gruesomely cloying apology. So fear not, dear reader, all’s well in Smearville again.)

By the way, if you’d like a great example of the lynchmob deploring the lynchmob while using lynchmob tactics, we’ll point you no further than Denver’s fucking feeblest alternative media source: Westword.

This from Patricia Calhoun, our favorite editor-in-cunt:

Just when the University of Colorado was starting to resurrect its reputation, journalism professor Michael Tracey, long a sideshow in the JonBenet Ramsey circus, hits (or is that creates?) the news with his creepy e-mail exchange with John Mark Karr — in which Tracey (pictured) looks about as much a journalist as Ward Churchill does a native American.

The rest.

Really, Ms. Calhoun, and what evidence do you have that Ward Churchill isn’t exactly he says he is? As we recall, he’s been vouched for by no less than Russell Means and Winona LaDuke (among many others) while the only thing you’ve got on your side is a Rocky genealogy trumped up by two bloggers and a retired New Jersey cop – not to mention the word of a gang of rapists and murderers.

So, do tell, how does Ward Churchill’s lynching differ from the Ramseys’ lynching?

We’d really love to hear you sputter your way through that logic.

It’s pathological at this point: even while decrying lynching, they can’t help finding their hands compulsively arranging noose-knots in the old hemp.