Dear Ms. Gloria-Jane

Dear Ms. Gloria-Jane,

On Wednesday, while I was sitting in the office dealing with all that fun stuff readers don't care about and

anticipating the upcoming Thanksgiving Day off, you called me.

Initially, you presented yourself as an intelligent, reasonable sounding person who called to voice your opinion about our publication, in a rational way that encourages intelligent conversation. Then at some point during your monologue, something snapped and you went from calm to chaos in a blink.

"I just can't believe that you would put out such a horribly right-wing paper. Your editorials are laced with ugly right-wing opinions like the one by the county Republican guy, blah-blah-blah," on and on you went, verbally beating me up pretty good.

Now I let you go on so mostly because I'm benevolent that way and I thought it might make you feel better. I don't know if it did.

But, before I could say anything, you ended our one-sided conversation with several U.S. Marine quality swear words and an accusation that even though you would write for us, you knew we wouldn't hire you. Then you were gone with a click and a hiss of static.

I wish you would have stayed on the line a minute or two longer because I would have told you that you were exactly right.

In fact, you couldn't be more spot on if you tried; we would not hire you to write.

Mostly because we are at full staff and can't hire anybody but also because you're kind of a potty-mouth and we deal with the public a lot. You might offend.

I would, however, have invited you to write your feelings-in an edited manner-and send them to me so that I could publish them. Like we do with 98 percent of all letters and opinion pieces that we receive.

You still can write, Gloria-Jane.

Since you didn't give me a chance to respond to your accusations on the phone, I would like to address them here.

First off, I think you might have a hard time in convincing Democrat Representative Cullie Tarleton and Democrat Senator Steve Goss that we are right-wing since Tarleton's Raleigh Report runs near weekly, normally on page seven, and Goss' Bringing Raleigh Home column runs when the senator's folks send it to us. Now why would a right-wing publication print columns by Democrats? No, the answer is not because we have to.

We also run pieces from Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx but that didn't stop one of her staffers from accusing us of being left-leaning Roy Carter supporters. He was wrong, too.

As far as running Chairman Wheeler's piece, I have open invitations to all party chairs to send me anything they want.

In case you missed it, the Oct. 30 edition of this paper printed three very critical (some quite ugly), letters criticizing Wheeler's ad campaigns on behalf of Republican candidates this past election cycle.

Should I have not let Wheeler defend himself? Would that be right?

As a matter of fact, he's a little ticked off at me because I edited out a couple of names in his piece. He has a point on one of them.

As more evidence of our right-wing bias, I will point out that we regularly run re-caps of the monthly Democrat meetings and special photos they send us like the recent send-off for the Obama team member that worked this area.

During the campaign season we took great pains to run head-to-head Question and Answer pieces between all candidates, including what Libertarians we could find, during the lead-up to the election.

And we have let several left-leaning guests' commentaries run back during the primaries and most recently in the Oct. 30 issue in which we printed a very liberal-sounding, anti-Republican guest column by Henry Doss.

In the last two months we have run letters and guest columns with such titles as Sarah Palin Should Terrify More than Just Feminists, Two Men We Need to Send Back to Raleigh, A Blizzard of Lies, Responding to Rhodes, Appalled by GOP Ad, To the Undecided Voters of Ashe, Foxx Misleading her Supporters, Wheeler's Letter and Say No to Radical Change. All of which were pro-Obama, liberal, anti-Republican or anti-Wheeler.

Honestly, looking at it comparatively, we run on average three to four more left-leaning letters and columns than we do right-leaning ones. If anybody might complain it would be the Republicans. They can't complain though, because it's their fault. If more Republicans wrote in, I would print more. Same goes for the Libertarians and any other organized political parties. Emphasis on organized.

Gloria-Jane, you insult the intelligent people who read this paper and you insult me and my staff with such baseless accusations, so easily disproved.

You would have embarrassed yourself if I had chosen to use your real name.

Am I critical of President-designate Obama? Yes.

Was I critical of McCain and Palin with equal enthusiasm? I think so.

I haven't hidden how I felt about this election. My guy was Governor Bill Richardson. He's a Democrat, Gloria-Jane, in case you didn't know. After him I would have been okay with Mitt Romney-good financial credentials and that could come in handy right now.

I have never felt, and still do not feel that Obama is the right guy. At the same time, I hope he does good things. I actually want to be wrong about this one because the land of the free is in trouble right now.

You know, you don't fool me; I could probably pick you out in a crowd if I knew you were there.

You are one of those bitter Democrat winners I have been running into since the election. It confuses the hell out of me too. You guys won almost every race that was up for grabs everywhere and kicked the GOP's collective butt in a way not seen since post-Watergate. Well, everywhere that is but Ashe County, North Carolina, which went for the most part two-to-one Republican.

This brings me to one more point you made about our right-wing bias.

"With all this right-wing stuff you are running, you must not know or care what the people around here think."

Well, Gloria-Jane, truth be told, if I did that, if I ran heavy right-wing stuff, ignored Goss and Tarleton and never took a phone call from Melba Jones, the Democrat Chair, I would be catering to the political majority of Ashe County. But this newspaper doesn't do that.

Gloria-Jane, I hope you do write me and prove to me where we are right-wing. Unless that is, the fact that we don't exclude conservative opinion makes us so.

I'm proud of what we do here, and I'm proud of the people who do it.

Not because of their politics, but because they are able to put their politics aside to report the news.

Editorial columns are different. Most folks can separate the two.

As for you Gloria-Jane, I pity you and all that bitterness. And I'm very glad your side didn't lose, you might have jumped off a building or something. That would be a shame.

*For the record, Gloria-Jane is not the real name of the woman who called. But she did remind me a lot of two well known liberal women-Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda. I therefore named her, and her abrasive out of control chainsaw demeanor, in honor of them.