GraniteGrok

Let's be clear - Fergus, with this unfortunate incident, has shown himself to be a rather shallow person; one more than willing to kick another Republican (and, truth be told, identified himself as a Conservative FIRST) when he is down - rather hypocritical when he told me, flat out, that WE shouldn't be doing it during his reign [or should that read "failed reign"?] as NH GOP Chair.  So I'll be addressing Mr. Fergus's "holier than thou" editorial over the next few days from a factual standpoint.

Why?  In his rush to dish on his long time political foe, Fergus decided to not bother doing his homework.  Let's address how much he decided to "conveniently" leave aside.

An ugly incident last weekend provides a teachable moment for Republicans about the risk of trying to appeal to the fringe as they prepare for next year's elections.

Doug Lambert of Gilford is a conservative blogger who broadcasts a low-wattage AM radio show on Saturday mornings — think "Wayne's World" with a web cam...

...All of this begs a basic question: Why on Earth were leading Republicans pandering on a fringe show with zero measurable audience in the first place? What were they thinking? 

First, while Fergus may have a very high opinion of himself, our take was, and always has been, of just being "two ordinary schlubs from Central New Hampsha" - nothing less, but certainly nothing more.  Not having ever done radio before, one starts where one can and where the opportunity presents itself.  In the highly competitive Lakes Region area (around a 30,000 population), where there is a lot of programming available on both the AM and FM bands, we did start on a small station - a 1,000 watt station who was willing to take a flier on two bloggers not really known outside of the local area (and in many respects, not well known inside that local area either).  Thus, in that respect, Fergus was correct: no ratings on a small station.

Much to Fergus's chagrin, I'm sure, that basement level start did not stay that way.  In fact, our Account Manager and  Program Manager from the station,  just a couple of weeks ago, proudly had give us the news: we had become the number one talk show in our time slot (Saturday mornings, 9 - 11 am) in the Lakes Region.  Using the national standard rating service, Arbitron, here's the actual numbers averaged over the last two "books" (Spring and Fall):

So, from the above, one can see we we fared quite well - WEMJ was only outdone by FM based music stations.  If you look carefully, you can see that we even beat out our station's sister station, the Big Gun, WLNH, that otherwise dominates the local area.  Now, throw in our online listeners (which I crafted two technical solutions, given that the station does not stream anything), we actually beat the number one rated station which brought us a national and international audience.  Our closest competitor in the Lakes Region, albeit on a much higher wattage station and a broadcast history of a much longer time span (and on which we got our radio start, truth be told) had a rating of 4.  Yes, Fergus: not 4,000, not 400, not 40 - just 4.

Hardly a "zero measurable audience", eh?

So, Fergus, I can only come up with three reasons why you would have said "zero measurable audience in the first place?"

• You're completely stupid (which I don't believe but might not totally discount)
• You completely clueless (which I also don't believe but that might be an option)
• You are being completely vindictive towards a long term political foe who has already:
• apologized profusely (thus showing the NH Political world, again, your level of class by not accepting that apology yourself)
  
• totally disarmed himself (by removing himself from all aspects of public life) and thus will not speak out in his own defense

I'm betting myself a brownie that I already know which one my readers may think reads true.

Sidenote:Oh yeah before you try THIS stunt, GraniteGrok has an Alexa rating of being in the top 0.538% of the websites it tracks.  And that is WITHOUT me doing any SEO tuning (one of these days I'll get around to it, but we've never written to "get rankings").

So, while one may have fallen, another soldier takes his place.  Thus, the problem is, now you have me - and seeing that you have now attacked me via attacking the show, let me say this: I can do this ALL DAY LONG.  And enjoy it too!  After all, this brought back memories of you sneering at me at the Republican meeting held at Alton's High school "Oh, such a crack journalist we have here" and pranced away.  At the time, I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on.  After all, that's what ordinary schlubs do - put their noses to the grindstone and just do the job at hand instead of putting on "airs".

In fact, I urge any of the Conservatives in NH that have been attacked in the past by you (and it seems that it may well be a Mount Washington boatload given some of the emails that have already arrived unsolicted) to send me some of your stories - I will keep it absolutely anonymous.  Here, I'll even ante up a very special email to use:

FergusTheVindictive@GraniteGrok.com

I thought that FergusTheClown might have been easier one to type, but please use the above.  So, if you have a story, an anecdote,  or a joke about FTV (just keep them clean folks), send it along.

I'll address the rest of his screed later on...

 Note: could the name tag be ANY larger (shades of "do you know who I am?")?