Watts: Attacks on McShanes felt like ‘hit’ pieces

Written by Sam Taylor | The Bellingham Herald | April 17, 2009

In the category of “Bizarro World” former Bellingham City Councilman John Watts has come to the defense of Dan and Lisa McShane on his blog.

Watts, who has argued vehemently against the Lake Whatcom watershed land reconveyance that Dan McShane has definitely been passionately involved in, and even brought it up in the 2007 mayoral and County Executive elections, says this:

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not close friends with the McShanes, although I do happen to share many -probably most- of their core values, including preservation of the environment, our quality of life, and healthy and honest political campaigning in the greater public’s interest, and the like.
All those things seem pretty important to me, and I suspect the McShanes and I agree on most of them, even though I did choose to strongly support other candidates in the last Mayoral race.

The two things that bug me the most about the NWC pieces were these:

• They seemed more like personal attacks -’hit’ pieces – based past feelings and history than rational arguments rooted in current facts or issues that are in evidence.

• They followed a standard ‘victim’s’ formula of just criticizing the ‘status quo’, rather than offering reasonable alternatives or volunteering anything that could be useful.

This might be shocking (end sarcasm, we all know every Watts post is long), but Watts says a lot more over at his blog, right here.

Meanwhile, Elisabeth Britt has her 17,000th post up on this subject, right here.