"So I go to the list of applicants for the open seat on the Seattle City Council to try to figure out what time I might get my three minutes to speak tomorrow, and what do I find? I’m not on the fucking list!
Are they arrogant, incompetent, or just plain stupid?
I’m sure the Council received my letter – it was quoted in The Seattle Times. Did they reject me on some unwritten technicality? Did the downtown-centric members mistakenly believe that my South Seattle neighborhood was outside city limits? Did they simply choose not to take my candidacy seriously? Did they have that right?
We all know there are only a handful of serious contenders, and us other ninety-some applicants are mostly a bunch of crackpots. Yet the one crackpot to whom they choose to summarily deny consideration, is the one crackpot with the loudest voice. I mean, what do they possibly have to gain by dissing one of the most widely read and influential bloggers in the state? (Um… that would be me.)
“Oh sure,” they might say, “he wasn’t a serious candidate. He used the words ‘fuck’, ’shit’, ‘prick’, and ‘asshole’ in his application.”
Well… fuck that.
Not a serious candidate? I see they’re giving Al Runte his three minutes, and yet when I personally suggested his name to Jean Godden a couple weeks ago, she actually laughed! I mean sure, Al’s got a funny last name and all, but Jean literally waved me off laughing at the thought of appointing him to the open seat. Really.
So Al they’ll humor, but me… not so much.
Which, from a media outreach perspective, is just plain dumb, because that private exchange between me and Jean is exactly the type of incident I wouldn’t have blogged on… if the Council hadn’t just given me the finger. (Fair warning to Peter Steinbrueck: next time you’re at the Intiman, you better start of all your sentences with “off the record"… you never know who might be seated near you.)
Yeah, I know I wrote an irreverent, foul-mouthed application letter, but that still didn’t give them the right reject it. And if the Council really didn’t want me to speak due to concerns about time, decorum, or anything else… all they had to do was politely ask.
For the irony is, I wasn’t even planning to speak tomorrow anyway. When I saw how many crackpot 3-minute speeches they’d have to sit through, I decided not to burden them with my own. Why? Because I had too much respect for the council members.
“Had” being the operative word.
UPDATE:
I just received a reply from the Council in response to my inquiry:
The application process, described on the Council’s web page and in press releases, required that applicants send both a Letter of Interest and a resume. There is no record of receiving a resume from you; therefore, you were not considered an eligible candidate.
Well, really, that’s a load of shit… an excuse to keep me out of the process. When I first sent my application, they emailed back that they couldn’t print it out properly. If they technically needed a separate piece of paper with the word “Resume” on it, they could have told me, and I could have given them that too. Not that I would have put anything else on it.
As far as I’m concerned, this is just like the time the Attorney General sued me because my initiative was “outside the scope” of the initiative process, when they let some filings stand that weren’t even complete sentences.
As far as I’m concerned, the Council, like much of government, is filled with a bunch of fearful, self-serious, humorless drones. They need to lighten up."-from HorsesAss.
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