In trouble with the blog
There is an article in The Press today in which Christchurch Mayoral candidate Bob Parker has taken offence at what he labels a smear campaign against him, based on a comment on Tony Milne’s blog. Tony is standing for the City Council on the Christchurch 2021 whose mayoral candidate, Megan Woods, is standing against Bob Parker.
The Google cache of the particular post was archived by Whale Oil. I remember when reading it at the time that I thought it was very unwise for Tony to not only refer to “persistent rumours” about Bob Parker, but also express that he is baffled by the comments about the the challenges of his new wife Joanna (who for those visually impaired is drop dead gorgeous and somewhat younger than Bob) establishing a relationship with his adult children. Not sure what is baffling about that – pretty common in second marriages.
Now Tony got some flack on his blog for it, and then Insolent Prick and Whale Oil blogged about his comments highlighting the unsavoury comments re Parker. Tony then modified his post to remove the comments on Parker and also deleted the comments on the post complaining about the comments.
Tony claims that his comments on the “persistent rumours” were referring to a possible September wedding for Parker and his fiancĂ©e. I’m sorry, but as Tui says “Yeah Right”. That’s just too cute for words and while arguably plausible don’t fit the context.
The Canterbury Public Issues Forum has a thread on the whole issue, including posts from Tony, Parker and Megan Woods.
It’s an interesting trail of events. A post on one blog that was only up for a short period is cached on Google and then linked to by another blog, and then noticed by the subject of the post who raises it on an online forum, and some exchanges happen there, and then finally it becomes a story in the main newspaper.
While the damage done is self inflicted by Tony, he does actually have my sympathy. We have all posted stuff we shouldn’t have, and regretted it later. One reason I have no desire to ever be a candidate is because it does then make any such bad calls much more newsworthy.