Meanwhile, in Bizarro Charlestown …

If Friday's heat and humidity dulled your faculties to the point that you were bored enough to wander along the interwebs to the place we fondly call "Oppressive Charlestown" (a.k.a. the CCA's "Blog and Mailbox" page),* you may have come across a pair of puzzling and oddly juxtaposed posts. 

One, titled "Protected: CCA 2012 Platform for Charlestown," consisted of a single line of text that read "This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:" and a password box, with no explanation of how one was to obtain a password (screenshot below the fold). This, dear reader, should tell you everything you need to know about the CCA philosophy of open, transparent government.

The next post was #3764 in Michael Chambers's series of flatulent whines about how the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee supposedly doesn't explain its platform.

Only in Bizarro Charlestown.

Fans of Bizarro World know it is an alternate universe that's the mirror image of our own. In Bizarro Charlestown, Michael Chambers has styled himself as the anti-Will Collette, and Chambers's banal observations reflect the opposite of reality.

"Openness and transparency," CCA-style.

Chambers has been blathering on and on for months about how the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee supposedly doesn't have a platform when in fact he had simply failed to click on the link. Funny thing, though; until Friday's password-protected post, the word "platform" didn't appear anywhere on the CCA website other than in Chambers's complaints about the platforms of others and a repost of a Westerly Sun article from 2008 announcing the CCA platform for the 2008 elections.

Speaking of prior election cycles, other than that story, as far as I can tell, whatever items the CCA had posted in previous elections have disappeared down the memory hole. Makes it kinda difficult to determine how well the CCA candidates have lived up to their campaign promises. Which I suppose is one way to never be accused of breaking a promise.

When CCA announced their endorsed candidates for 2012, they stated that they'd all pledged to adhere to the CCA mission. Then sometime on Saturday, they updated their "CCA 2012 Platform for Charlestown" post to include five brief platform planks of roughly the same length as the CDTC's six, along with a promise to flesh them out in the coming week. Though oddly enough, after all their ranting and raving about civility or lack thereof, the CCA platform makes no mention of it, and in fact, in an uncharacteristic flash of honesty, they've dropped their mission-statement pledge of "open, professional and ethical government that is transparent" in favor of a plank called "Accountable and Ethical Leadership."

Accountable to whom, though? Guess we'll find out this week. Only in Bizarro Charlestown … 
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* Although I don't recommend it; postings there seldom reward the effort it takes to read them and I generally find myself wishing I could get the time back that I’d spent.