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It’s Not the Cheating, Dear. It’s the Lies |
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Perspective
By Ken Draper
I feel like the angry ingénue in the Turner Channel late night film classics: “It’s not the cheating,” she says, “it’s the lies. I just can’t take the lies anymore.”
That’s the way I feel about City Hall’s politicos. You may not be with me on everything and you may owe some vote-debt to a colleague or two, but stop the lying.
Today’s poll-conscious electeds feel the need to spin every idea … good or devious. We can’t be trusted with the truth.
They did it with the trash fee. They did it with the phone tax. They did it with the Prop R term limit caper. Now comes the closing of the vice on fast food establishments in South LA.
This is Jan Perry’s deal where she’s going to lick the obesity and diabetes plague by keeping the fast food folks out of her neighborhood. If the idea weren’t such a serious infringement on a citizen’s right to personal choice, it would be a laugh-out-loud silly.
The thought that banning new burger joints will have the slightest impact on these health issues is nonsense. Or, for that matter, will have any impact on the more serious challenges faced by the hard working folks of South LA. Gang violence, economic growth, medical care come quickly to mind.
The bigger issue I have with Ms Perry and her supporters on this cockamamie plan has to do with deception. The lies.
Perry wants some meaningful real estate in her district, while there’s still some to grab, to be able to offer to developers of more consequence than Jack in the Box. Folks that can provide retail and entertainment options in the neighborhood and, at the same time, keep those consumer dollars at home.
The fast food businesses tend to be small single story buildings but they take up a lot space for parking, thinks Perry. So she wants to save those future parking lots for the builders with bigger bucks.
We can debate the logic, and legalities, of that concept another time. She may even be onto a reasonable plan. But, why the deception?
If this is what you want to accomplish … and those developer relationships are clean and by the books … why not just say so? If the good folks of South LA are smart enough to elect Ms Perry, why not assume they are smart enough to handle the truth behind Perry’s obesity/diabetes scam?
Why spend all of that time out front claiming this motion was about health when it’s really about development? Why lie?
Is it any wonder that the credibility of the community of elected officials registers so low that it’s hard to scrape up with a razor blade?
I want government to stop with the ‘choice police.’ I want them to stop forcing their preferences on me. I want them to stop trying to resolve all of our social ills with one more law. As if you can actually legislate behavior. (If you could our jails and prisons wouldn’t be splitting at their bureaucratic seams.)
But, most of all, stop spinning us. Stop conning us. Stop scamming us. Stop insulting our intelligence. Stop lying to the public. And, stop presuming that you are smarter than the folks on the street. We’ve been watching. There’s not a whole lot of evidence of genius to support that thesis.
And certainly, as the examples given earlier demonstrate, City Hall’s politicians haven’t shown any great skill at handling the truth.
It’s not the cheating. It’s the lies I can’t take anymore!
(Ken Draper is the editor of CityWatch. He can be reached at
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CityWatch
Vol 6 Issue 64
Pub: Aug 8, 2008
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