Monday, November 20, 2006

Whining Odum


Please, will someone tell Johnny Odum over at Green Mountain Daily to just fucking grow up already? Why is it that when I read him I feel like I’m watching a kid who’s dressing up in his daddy’s clothes? The poor fella, he thought having his own blog was going to give him some talent. But it doesn’t work that way, Johnny Boy. In fact, it works in the opposite direction: first you’ve got to have some talent and then you create a successful project.

Today, Odum’s whining about Darren Allen of the Vermont Press Bureau. And while he’s trying his hardest to make a coherent political argument, little Johnny Odum just sounds like a jealous little whiner. Come on, Odum, we know why you’ve got a hard-on for Allen: He totally dissed you in his piece about Vermont bloggers. Better yet, Allen totally understands that you’re not worth taking seriously and he stuck his fucking finger in your eye. And now you’re going to nitpick him to death under the thinly disguised hoax of intellectual political discourse. Whatever.

In response, Allen offers a bit of a response in his blog today. And the best part of the response is that he refuses to name Odum or the Green Mountain Daily. Ha! Take that, little Johnny!

For some reason, Odum thinks that because he’s got a couple dozen readers everyone’s supposed to treat him like he’s Vermont’s Tim Russert or something. It’s totally fucking bizarre. Here’s a little cheat-sheet into little Johnny’s approach to media criticism: Quote him positively and he loves you, ignore him or criticize him and he hates you. It’s really not that hard.

And let’s not forget about little Johnny’s day job: “associate” membership coordinator for a local nonprofit, the Vermont Natural Resources Council. Wow! What credentials! How could Allen possibly deny you full access to his every column? Fuck, he can’t even run the department; he’s just a goddamn associate.

In fact, little Johnny isn’t even taken seriously at VNRC. Why else would they have skipped over him and hired Jake Brown of The Bridge last week to run their communications department? Yep, little Johnny wants the state’s media elite to take him seriously in the realm of journalism and political thought but his own bosses at VNRC gave him the total blow-off when it came to an in-house promotion.

Poor Johnny, no one’s taking him seriously. Thank God.