I’ve started columns many times in the past by writing, “I don’t know what to write about.” This time I know what to write about, I just don’t want to. But I have to. And Mesa County Republicans made me do it.

First up, let me explain to Mesa County Republicans — and JJ Fletcher, one candidate for Mesa County commissioner — how a newspaper works. Newspapers have three distinct divisions: content, opinion and advertising. And when a newspaper is run properly — just like the Ghostbusters — you never cross the streams. This means that ads don’t buy you stories or favorable opinion columns. It also means we don’t ask about political or personal opinions when doing stories. And it means we don’t pressure you for ads because we’re doing a story about your business.

Editor Phil Castle and I have done things this way for nearly a quarter of a century together. Yet, it’s becoming apparent local Republicans somehow missed all of that.

And that conclusion, of course, comes as a result of an opinion column I wrote. Apparently, my opinion is the only one local Republicans fight back against, even though they also know all the local media will be fully against them and crossing streams the second the coming primary comes to a close. Ask any of your candidates or elected officials, local Republicans, especially the women.

So, this next lesson should come as a shock to both JJ and the local Republican chairwoman — who I knew nothing about or even realized the party had a new chair — until her phone call. Opinion columns don’t warrant retractions. No matter how much JJ tries and wishes and demands an event HE scheduled and promoted via two of the area’s biggest progressives “didn’t happen,” what is actually not happening is any retraction from the fact the event was scheduled. I wrote my opinion on it and JJ then canceled — probably due to the column I wrote since Republican leadership was too feeble to tell JJ to do the right thing.

As for the “Tina Peters support” JJ denies and demands I tell readers the “truth” about because he voted for the current county clerk this last election, let’s just ask the obvious question. Who’d you vote for the time before? On top of that, why do you keep bringing up the Dominion machines when and where it’s politically expedient? I realize it’s the same reason you bring up the “popular” former health director, but I also understand you backed the county commission on both those issues until perhaps someone told you it’s time to apply for another job? Perhaps those establishment folks you keep getting quoted as saying Janet Rowland obviously has the support of? The ones the current Republican chair also had to make a special phone call to me about.

That’s right folks. In addition to the emails and phone calls I received about my column, the new Republican chairwoman decided to vent her feelings towards me regarding what I can only perceive to be a pretty dead-on column in terms of what’s going on in the party. But it was the comment the party chair was thinking of primarying County Commissioner Janet Rowland that fueled the local chair’s fire. But the current chair should know it couldn’t have been directed at her, because 1., she knows she didn’t do it and 2., I had no idea we had a new chair or who she is. But if one has those rational realizations, how can one make it all about them?

Well, here’s how in this case, it’s using the phrase “broad brush” I painted the party chair with — used in an email to me from a “friend” of the chair and then in the chair’s phone call. First, it’s your brush, not mine. Second, since I had no idea who you are, you simply can’t then claim I did it intentionally in an attempt to harm you personally. That’s a very broad brush, indeed.

Last, in all the back and forth on my call with the chair, I was snidely accused of “knowing everything going on in the party.” I don’t, and don’t want to. But more important: Why doesn’t the chair at the very least know what I know? She claimed she didn’t know about JJ’s meet and greet at Claudette Kanola’s house until my column. Say what? She then explained it away by saying the party can’t tell a candidate, or anyone, who to talk to or what to say. Unless the party is demanding it from a local columnist, apparently.

Then again, this is the same party which, according to a very active member, asked Lauren Boebert to run in Ken Buck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on’s congressional district to “save” the seat. You know, the safest Republican district in the state which Buck (with his antics) won with more than 60 percent of the vote last time? So, the Republicans think it’s a smart move to replace Buck with the one candidate whose antics are so bad, she has almost guaranteed a Democrat win this election in what many consider the second safest Republican district in the state?

Yet, somehow that one publisher, he’s the problem. But back to my retraction. My affiliation with your party is retracted. Effective immediately.

Craig Hall is owner and publisher of the Business Times. Reach him at (970) 424-5133 or publisher@thebusinesstimes.com.