Sometimes, here in Cathedral City, events occur which impel me to put fingers to keyboard to address certain potentially problematic issues in the city. Today’s Little Snappers concern some disturbing revelations about the Cathedral City Police Department, the candidacy of Rita Lamb for the open Council seat in in the First Council District, and the disturbing recrudescence of the Berniebro phenomenon in the hypertrophic, hyperextended, hyperventilating, 2020 Democratic primary.
Our Political Police
According to a June 11, 2019 article in our local Gannett publication, "Cathedral City’s cops are afraid of facing retribution for 'truth telling.'" I call crybaby self-victimization.
Surprisingly for The Desert Sun, reporter Christopher Damien and his editors managed to avoid burying the lede. A few grafs further down the article, however, a rather disturbing revelation appears concerning the apparent political atmosphere within the department:
“[S]everal respondents expressed concern over the ‘current political climate against law enforcement’ and ‘anti-crime [sic], pro-criminal laws.’ Others complained about the proliferation of marijuana. One, misspelling the names of several prominent Democratic politicians[,] replied: ‘Gavin Newsom, Alex [sic] Becerra, Kamila [sic] Harris, and if Jerry Brown continues to seek publicity celibrating [sic] their pro-criminal anti-law enforcement agendas.’”Now it is generally taken as virtually a given that law enforcement personnel tend to skew strongly conservative in their politics. It is also taken as a given that law enforcement tends to embrace a corporate culture that regards the law enforcement-industrial complex as the curators, custodians, and conservators of what are, or in the view of the law enforcement-industrial complex, “ought” to be the “correct” values of a given society or body politic, values which they see it as their mission to enforce, usually with increased vigor on those communities they see as “cultural dissidents.”
Given the politically and culturally conservative nature of most law enforcement personnel, it is hardly surprising that most of them would break heavily Republican. Thus, it is hardly surprising to see our local law enforcement busily engaged in a travestying the Democratic political leadership of this State.
Add to that the self victimization narrative pointed out in the article, and it’s clear that we have some serious problems with what may well be an excessively politicized police force in Cathedral City.
Yet, when all is said and done, our cops work for us. We are supposed to be a city with a Police Department, not a Police Department with a city attached. In a community with a substantial number of Democrats, a substantial communidad latina, and a substantial queer contingent, we, its inhabitants, are entitled to live our lives without having to feel constant low-level apprehension that being a Democrat, being Latino or Latina, or being queer will get one crossways with a group of law enforcement personnel who see themselves more as the servants of Donald Trump and the forces of political and cultural conservatism than as apolitical servants of the commonweal and the commonwealth.
From the story as it appeared in our local Gannett publication, we may infer that there are a substantial number of Trump-supporting cops on our force who consider themselves victims because they have been asked to moderate their transports. They should be told that there is absolutely no room for political bullshit of any kind or character in what is supposed to be our apolitical police service. If they cannot or will not conform their conduct to that apolitical standard which we, as inhabitants of Cathedral City, as voters of Cathedral City, and as taxpayers of Cathedral City have an absolute, nonnegotiable, fundamental right to expect, then let them turn in their guns and their badges and depart hence. And if they won’t, then let us apply the Reagan/Thatcher solution and sack the lot.
The Problematic Candidacy of Rita Lamb in the First Council District
Earlier this year, outraged, exorcised, ready-for-a-rumble residents of Cathedral city’s newly minted first Council District were able to bludgeon, as it were, the four surviving members of the city Council into abandoning their idiotic plan to appoint a councilmember (from outside the district, at that) to serve out the unexpired term of the late Mayor Gregory S. Pettis. The Council, after much huffing and puffing, agreed, on a three to one vote, to call a special election in the first district, and to limit the candidates to residents of that district. Only councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, who merits recall for his antics, dissented.
Now that the Council, admittedly by constraint, and admittedly under threat of litigation and potential recall of the entire body, has done the right thing, two candidates have qualified for the ballot. One is former councilmember Shelley Kaplan, a man not only with council experience, but also with experience on other regional boards and commissions. The other is Rita Lamb, a retired schoolteacher who seems, on first blush, to be “perfectly nice.” “Perfectly nice,” that is, until you start taking a look at who is supporting and bankrolling her campaign.
Now most Democrats will piously pooh-pooh the idea of guilt by association, tarring it with the brush of “McCarthyism.” But, for all the piously self-defeating tropes Democrats deploy to shoot themselves in the foot, “they will know you by the company you keep,” or “when a person’s character is not clear, look to that person’s friends.”
On that score, Ms. Lamb’s campaign has already been fatally tainted by her associations. Her so-called press liaison, Miriam Alario, who admins a Facebook group denominated “Cathedral City Neighbors for Transparent Representation,” is a close friend of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olson, and, like her, is running a whispering campaign and a Facebook campaign against Mr. Kaplan with the tag “anybody but Shelley.”
Given that politics tend to be a rather binary enterprise, in which, in a single member constituency, there can only be one winner and a whole shitload of losers, it is fairly evident that the campaign against Mr. Kaplan is making use of all manner of unethical and potentially illegal campaign tactics. This would not be atypical of DeRosa and her supporters. In 2004, when DeRosa ran against her brother-in-law, then-Mayor George Stettler, she set in motion a whispering campaign alleging that he was suffering from dementia.
In subsequent campaigns, DeRosa was fined by the Fair Political Practices Commission for state law campaign finance violations. In short, DeRosa and her loyalists have always been willing to sail very close to the wind. If Ms. Lamb is willing to have such people on her campaign staff, then we may draw some extremely non-recommending inferences about her character and her fitness to serve. We cannot afford a pale political clone of councilmember Ernesto Gutierrez, or of the late councilmember Chuck Vasquez, who had to resign from the Council in disgrace after being caught embezzling from the City.
Rita Lamb’s campaign has been fatally tainted, she needs to bow out.
Godzilla’s return, the Revenge of the Japanese-Holdout-on-Pacific-Island Berniebros.
They're baaaaack!
Just when you thought the nastiness of the 2016 Democratic primary had begun to fade, Bernie and his Bros, like marooned Japanese holdouts fighting World War II on lonely Pacific islands long after the Shōwa Emperor ordered the Japanese Armed Forces to stand down and surrender to the Allies, are still waging nasty, fratricidal war against the Democratic Party and against supporters of authentic Democratic candidates who are now beginning to knock him out of second place in the primary contests.
Of course, we knew that Bernie and the Bros would wage what amounted to a terrorist campaign against front runner Joe Biden. Bernie apparently blew several gaskets when polling began to show that Biden had built up a substantial lead. Now that Elizabeth Warren has pipped Bernie for second place in the crowded Democratic primary field, his anger can be expected to be coruscating. To be in third place behind a woman!
Though Berniebros have not yet attacked Sen. Warren the way they launched vicious, misogynistic calumnies against Hillary Clinton, the operative word is YET. Gospodin Sanders is getting the vetting now that none of his starry eyed, redeless, twentysomething supporters were willing to do in 2016. Even the media, which eagerly suspended its critical faculties and failed to perform any kind of due diligence on the bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, is now beginning to realize that the loudmouth Leninist has real feet of clay.
Of course, this will cause the Berniebros to swing into full on attack mode, using any form of asymmetric, insurgent political warfare available to them. During World War II, suicidal Japanese charges were often referred to as “banzai charges,” from the Japanese phrase “Tennō Heika banzai,” or “10,000 years to the Emperor.” A Banzai charge was usually the last expression of a forlorn hope, intended to destroy as many Allied lives as possible, while permitting the participants to go out in a blaze of metaphorical glory. As Sanders’s path to any possible Democratic nomination starts to narrow, his Bros will be sharpening their metaphorical bayonets and katana, preparing for the final, forlorn Banzai charge that they hope may confer upon their lost cause some of what noted Japanologist Ivan Morris once referred to as “the nobility of failure.”
But while kamikaze attacks may be enshrouded in a numen of some sort of noble failure, they still do real damage. The kamikaze mentality of the Sanders intransigents in 2016 damaged the Hillary Clinton campaign so badly as to pave the way for the advent of the unbelievably corrupt Donald Trump. Now, three years later, the Berniebros are set to do it all over again. We must prevent this from happening; those who facilitate treason out of spite are traitors themselves. The Democratic Party must stop being “Minnesota nice,” and fight this primary to win.
They pull a knife, we pull a gun; they send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. For our own safety’s sake, we must resist the blandishments of Gospodin Sanders and his redeless Komsomoltsy.
