Category: Blogging

Someone sent me a link to local blogger Mike ‘Jackie’ Brown’s response to my E-City Beat piece criticizing Brown for ridiculing Sheriff Jesse Slaughter.

I not only consider Jesse to be an outstanding sheriff, but I also regard him as a friend. And I will never hesitate to speak up and push back on ANYONE who wants to take cheap shots at him. Especially someone like Brown who specializes in sitting behind a keyboard criticizing others.

I must have really gotten under old Jackie’s thin skin. He gets really defensive when someone gives him a little taste of the nasty medicine he dishes.

He begins by providing a dictionary definition of ‘rookie’, “Rookie – a person who is new to an organization or an activity”.

Brown tries to palm this off as his justification for his snide and snarky reference to Sheriff Slaughter as a ‘rookie’ riding in on a horse or something in response to Judge Larson tossing a Great Falls man in jail for not wearing a mask in the courtroom, “…But then we have rookie Sheriff Jesse Slaughter ride into the scene.”

I suppose we could also use the typical sports world definition for rookie, meaning a player in his first year. Slaughter was elected Cascade County Sheriff in 2018 and has been in office for over a year and a half.

If Brown had bothered to do any research at all he would have discovered that in law enforcement, police officers are considered ‘rookie cops’ in their first year on ‘the job’. So if you want to talk about strict definitions then Sheriff Slaughter is not a ‘rookie’ sheriff.

Not only is Slaughter not a ‘rookie’ as Sheriff, he’d been a law enforcement officer for 18 years before being elected – putting his life on the line to help keep arrogant critics like old Jackie safe.

Brown’s after-the-fact use of a ‘source’ to define ‘rookie’ was nothing more than a phony attempt to cover his butt for his ignorant, “…But then we have rookie Sheriff Jesse Slaughter ride into the scene” original slur.

The two or three folks who read Brown’s Western Word blog may fall for that pathetic butt-covering attempt, but no one else does. Because it’s obviously dishonest.

Brown’s intention in tagging the sheriff as a ‘rookie’ was to mock and belittle Slaughter and make himself look like a big shot, savvy watchdog. He meant it as a pejorative, not as an accurate description of our sheriff’s professional status.

In his rebuttal Brown also tries to defend his attack on Slaughter, and me pointing out that Brown called the sheriff ‘dumb’, by writing the following: ‘…For the record, I said Slaughter was “dumber” not “dumb.” ‘

Good grief. Memo to Western Word readers: Jackie Brown thinks you’re idiots.

Finally, it’s really easy to tell which of my criticisms of Brown’s condescending and poorly thought through smear of Slaughter got to him the most. It’s the one where he tries to convince himself, because no one else would fall for it, that “…As I was reading Tryon’s column out loud to family and friends, the following line had tears of laughter rolling down our cheeks…”

Sorry, Jackie, no one is buying that “tears of laughter” were rolling down a bunch of folks cheeks as you read to them.

Brown’s blog is basically just another boring “I hate Trump and his supporters” local regurgitation of the same old TDS talking points that others have been doing at the national level for four years.

We’ve heard it all before, but Jackie should keep practicing his anti-Trump propaganda because he’s clearly out of his league when it comes to local issues.