Newsreel

My fellow left-wing nuts sometimes ask why the Weekly prints articles by that right-wing nut Emil Franzi. Isn't this a publication devoted to progressive solutions to local issues? Franzi is a self-proclaimed libertarian (with a lower-case L these days) and a notorious Republican operative, having lurked behind campaigns not only in Tucson but in California and Chicago as well.

A few pages further on, here's Franzi evaluating the recent city election. And guess what? He's happy the Republicans won.

So what's Franzi doing in an alternative weekly? Well, in the first place, he has historically hammered dippy Republicans in these pages even harder than Democrats. One of our missions is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and Franzi is especially good at the latter task, regardless of his target's political affiliation.

He's also a tree-hugger, which makes him to a limited extent a closet liberal, except he'll point out that Teddy Roosevelt was an environmentalist and a Republican at the same time. (TR was a gun-totin' hunter, too, and Franzi similarly never met a firearm he didn't like.)

Anyway, Franzi's been so deep into the local political muck for so long that he knows the dirt better than anyone. Even if we strongly disagree with his implication that Gayle Hartmann was an inferior candidate to Fred Ronstadt, we can't deny that Franzi is generally an astute hell-raiser, and that's precisely the kind of person who belongs in the Tucson Weekly.