Arizona Eagletarian: Huppenthal: It's time to POLISH THAT TURD!

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Huppenthal: It's time to POLISH THAT TURD!

Here's the turd, as spelled out by the Arizona Republic, in an editorial today:

The anonymous Internet is a revealing place, full of dangers and pitfalls. It has snared many people who failed to realize it is never as anonymous as they think.

John Huppenthal, Arizona's state schools superintendent, is the latest. For at least three years, while holding his statewide office, he has trolled various political websites. He shared ideas he would never utter as John Huppenthal under the names "Falcon9" and "Thucydides."

"I chose this approach because I felt that any other would limit a free and open exchange," he said in a statement e-mailed to The Arizona Republic.

Well, yes. It is rather limiting to be held accountable for expressing as facts statements that cannot withstand scrutiny. [...]

Yet the Internet is never really anonymous. Bloggers from the staunchly liberal Blog for Arizona and the equally conservative Seeing Red AZ noticed that a lot of Falcon9 and Thucydides' postings defended or advocated Huppenthal — and that they included personal details, including the names of childhood friends. From there, it didn't take long to trace the postings back to Department of Education computers.

Busted.

I wonder how many news or law enforcement agencies have requested copies of the Arizona Department of Education's employee handbook to find out what the official policy is on private use of state computers.

Anyway, there's a reason news websites like azcentral.com, azstarnet.com, Huffington Post and many more have eliminated anonymous comment posting in favor of Facebook, which has a policy requiring members to use their real names. Granted, there's some abuse of that (Facebook) policy but it still has made for higher levels of civility on those sites. And then there is the narcissist John Huppenthal, who apparently fancies himself a champion of conservatism and "... [a] father [of sorts] of "scientific history" because of his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis in terms of cause and effect..."

Several sites have reported on notable examples of Hupp's grandiose proclamations. The Phoenix New Times cited a top ten list of them.

New Times' Stephen Lemons called Hupp at home the other evening.

See, after waiting all day Monday to get a response from the GOP officeholder through regular channels, I figured I'd try him at home and ask him about being outed as a not-so-secret blogger by Bob Lord, attorney and former Democratic Congressional candidate, who writes for the influential, lefty opinion outlet BlogforArizona.net.

Why, I hadn't talked to my old bud, Hupp, since I saw him at a gun nut rally a while back at the state Capitol. I was certain he'd be happy to hear from me.

Boy, was I mistaken.

"Hey, Steve, how ya doin'?" he asked. Then, immediately, "You're gonna have better luck on your next phone call. I'm gonna let you go."

"Aw, come on," I said. "Why don't you wanna talk to me . . . about you pretending to be somebody else online? I want to make sure you actually are doing that. You know, using sock puppets online."

(Could've sworn he actually chuckled a bit here.)

"Hey, you're going to have better luck on your next call," he repeated.

"So you're not denying it?" I shot back.

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet," he said before hanging up.

The next morning, he had his chief of staff, Merle Bianchi, POLISH THAT TURD.

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Bianchi writes:

Context is everything.

I think she forgot that in most arenas, "Timing is everything." Or that in retail and real estate, it's all about "Location, Location, Location."

Bianchi finishes her turd polishing exercise with this statement that positively OOZES with irony:

When people are as passionate as I am about developing sound public policy occasionally emotions of the moment interfere with sound judgment and a more steady voice... I hope and trust our citizens will look deeper into individual records and reject superficial rhetoric.