In this morning's Denver feature on National Public Radio, reporter Jeff Brady purports to share with listeners the five things visitors to the Democratic National Convention should do while here but probably won't. His first item, though, is actually something DNC attendees should do but can't -- and that's witness a cattle drive through the streets of Denver. And one of the people held responsible for this sad state of affairs is one Dean Singleton, head of MediaNews Group and publisher of the Denver Post.
After pointing out that such throwback displays take place annually around the time of the National Western Stock show, Brady says the suggestion of staging something similar inhonor of the convention was shot down by, among others, Singleton. That's confirmed by the Post's Chuck Plunkett, who says his boss feared that if the first things delegates saw upon arriving were a bunch of cows, they might come to the conclusion that Denver is a cow town.
As a proud employee of a newspaper that's been putting cows on the cover for decades, I find that kind of thinking anti-bovine in the extreme. Besides, there's a good chance the cows would have been behaved better than the Democrats. -- Michael Roberts