Public Editor

My prediction, in this space last week, of a Red Wave that would
drown this year’s bumper crop of uppity liberals has, to say the very
least, come up short. While my Republican friends regroup and prepare
for 2010­—hopefully under the ideological aegis of Newt
Gingrich’s prodigious head—The Stranger, typically, is
resorting to childish, craven taunts.

Yes, it’s time for the Boasting Issue, wherein a collection of
disreputable authors praise their untested and underqualified
president-elect. Who was scraped from the bottom of the barrel and
given the opportunity to “write” a few hundred gloating words? A bunch
of people only my frantically Googling intern has heard of: JOHN
HODGMAN (allegedly a television personality), SARAH VOWELL (sounds
pretentious), EDMUND WHITE (a known homosexual deviant), ADAM HASLETT
(ibid.), and GARY SHTEYNGART (the surname alone suggests a need for
immediate INS investigation). This troupe is joined in its revelry by
the usual cast of reefer-smoking, herpes-having socialists: DAN SAVAGE,
CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE, LINDY WEST, CHARLES MUDEDE, and BRENDAN KILEY.
Not to mention the nauseatingly smug return by former Stranger film editor ANNIE WAGNER, who is apparently pursuing a legal degree in
Chicago out of some sort of blatant emulation of her personal hero,
Barack Hussein Obama, even though she is a white woman from Wedgwood.
What I want to know is this: How could a weekly newspaper, beset by a
shrinking national advertising market due in no small part to the
election of the aforementioned black celebrity to the highest office in
the land, afford to pay the freelance wages that the aforementioned
“writers” of purported notoriety command? I suspect there is some sort
of “trade” involved, some sort of other economy at work, but I have
eaten lunch too recently to dare inquire.

Moving on. The other sections of the paper seem, at first glance, to
be uncharacteristically restrained, even taciturn. But I have been
informed by sources inside the organization (unrelated personal note to
JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE: Your Cheetos and video-game quarters will be
delivered at the usual time and place) that due to unsurprisingly low
ad sales this week—because, again, of Barack Hussein
Obama—this particular issue is even lighter than recent ones have
been. According to the billboard-sized flow chart in my office, this
week’s page count represents something of a low for the paper, and I am
positively drooling to see how small future issues will get. Soon,
there won’t even be enough of The Stranger left to line the cage
of my pet cockatiel, which was the only function the surprisingly
absorbent material performed admirably. Dignified advertisers are
advised to skip this publication entirely and do business solely with
Seattle Weekly—which, for reasons that are not yet clear
to me, has been markedly smaller than The Stranger of late. One
assumes this is because upper management at Seattle Weekly has
wisely marshaled all of its financial resources toward paying a
suitable salary to its recently hired conservative reporter Don Ward, a
fine young man and the only writer in Seattle brave enough to announce
that Emperor Obama is positively nude.

publiceditor@thestranger.com