City Officials Should Unzip Their Lips on Tony
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
So Mayor Villaraigosa publicly thanks L.A. city officials for not taking shots at him for his love tryst with M. Salinas. They deserve thanks for that. After all, no one want to sucker punch someone when they’re down, and especially over love (dubious as it might be), a failed marriage, and infidelity.
But those same L.A. city officials, and presumably that’s the L.A. city council, the Supervisors, the city attorney, and the D.A., that zipped their lips on Tony’s love tryst, should have unzipped them to ask if Tony’s relationship with Salinas got his favorable and skewed reportage from her on the agenda he pushes in the city council, the terribly flawed, and failed school takeover fiasco, his trips to New York and Sacramento in which Salinas went along supposedly to report on, her failure to mention in her report on his separation that she was the other woman, and Tony’s knowing silence that Salinas was in a position to influence and sway public opinion on his pet public policy issues.
The silence of city officials on these issues, forget the affair, smacks not of respect, tact, and courtesy but a circle-the-wagon, cover-up. No real surprise to that.
Villaraigosa got his way with Salinas, so why not with city officials too.
With the media of all types and the blogs asking the Mayor all these pointed questions and more, to the point where he can't go out in public and be left alone to talk about anything else, there would hardly be any point to the city administration jumping on his case, too.
That doesn't mean that they might not have expressed their concerns privately. I hardly see what public condemnation of him would have served, except to get the accusers some self-serving P R. Even Rocky is apparently not dumb enough to walk into that one -- he's had one major attack blow up in his face, and expose him as the dumb media hound he is.
Now, which of the Mayor's enemies wants to follow Rocky?
As an ordinary citizen, I'd like to see our city get on with the business of running it: I'm more upset that we lost the transit funds virtually promised from Sacramento (with two of Salinas' former lovers, Padilla and Nunez adding to the L. A-stabbers, by the way), homeland security, and traffic and safety, and sending the illegal gangbangers home to Mexico.
(I've given up on the schools: there's not ONE decent middle or high school on the whole westside any more, except Pali, where locals can't even be guaranteed access), so like most westsiders, my main concern there is financial: how much are we going to keep paying to educate the kids of illegals, who make up the bulk of the enrollment?