Richard L. Connor, CEO of Wilkes-Barre Publishing and MaineToday Media, is not the only opinionated newspaperman to weigh in disapprovingly over the weekend on the Washington Post‘s SalonGate. (Las Vegas Review-Journal editor Thomas Mitchell did, too.) Or to joke about how he contemplated something similar himself. Connor:
I briefly thought about asking…residents to join me and my friends for breakfast at Tony’s on Wyoming Avenue in Kingston…Finally, I came to my senses and realized it would be difficult to call a place whose signature dish is “The Fat Bastard” omelet a “salon.”
Mitchell:
We kicked around the idea of offering to have our editorial board meetings in that silo room at the Draft House up on Rancho Drive. We’d call it a “saloon,” not the same cachet as a “salon,” but certainly more our “Battle Born” style.
But only Connor thought to link SalonGate, and Post publisher Katharine Weymouth’s role in it, to Gov. Palin’s abrupt resignation on July 3, in order to proclaim last week a “bad” one for women. Because while “men make stupid decisions every day,” Connor writes, two women made bad decisions on two days last week. Or something.
Palin should not have “quit” last week, Connor argues, nor should she have run for the White House with McCain since, Connor writes, McCain only “chose Palin as an interesting and sparkling trinket to dangle like jewelry from the neck of a presidential campaign that was flabby.” And Weymouth? She should have quit last week. But didn’t. To which Connor says:
[I]nstead of stepping up and taking responsibility for this hare-brained scheme, she tried blaming virtually anyone and everyone who may have been within earshot of her office in recent weeks.
Whatever.
