Summary: Yesterday, our local Gannett newspaper did something that didn’t surprise us at all. The editorial board saw fit to endorse Measure HH, the city charter for Cathedral City. But at the same time, the editorial board did not see fit to endorse councilmember Greg Pettis for reelection, opting instead to endorse the grossly unqualified Sergio Espericueta, a protgé/puppet of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her job back so badly she can taste it.
Never a group to let inconsistencies bother them, the Desert Sun’s editorial board chose to let itself be driven by antipathy, basing their decision to withhold endorsement from Mr. Pettis on unproven, over-the-top, three-year-old allegations made by former Desert Sun reporter Tamara Sone, a young and credulous wannabe journalist who, at the time, allowed herself to be spoonfed a whole series of claims originating out of the sociopathic mind of our former mayor. The Desert Sun didn’t see fit to do any due diligence or fact checking then, instead accepting DeRosa’s allegations uncritically. Now, three years later, they compound their act of journalistic malpractice by repeating those allegations again in order to justify endorsing a manifestly unqualified candidate.
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Our local Gannett newspaper, which surprised us all by endorsing the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton for president of the United States, when most of us in this Valley had expected them to go through every sort of forensic contortion imaginable to endorse Donald Trump (becoming the only newspaper in the country to do so, had they done so), demonstrated the other day that their endorsement of Sec. Clinton was to all intents and purposes a fluke.
The Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight did manage to do the right thing when it endorsed Measure HH, the proposed Cathedral City charter. But the Gannett that couldn’t shoot straight then managed to go wildly off the rails by declining to endorse Greg Pettis, the councilmember whose support for a Cathedral City charter has been steadfast and unflagging for years.
Instead, the editorial board saw fit to endorse Sergio Espericueta, a Council wannabe with no serious qualifications for public office save for being a protgé/puppet/stalking horse of former Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa, who wants her old job back so bad she can taste it.
Espericueta has become very much the public face of opposition to a charter in Cathedral City. Now the opposition to the charter is based on nothing more and nothing less than its provision for a rotating mayoralty. The Council and a large number of residents in Cathedral City, having before them the deplorable example of the ten winters of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s misgovernment of Cathedral city as mayor, felt it best that the mayoralty rotate among the members of the Council.
By rotating the mayoralty, the Council was acting proactively to protect the city from another disastrous mayoralty like that of Kathleen Joan DeRosa. If, after all, a mayor has only a twelvemonth at the helm, she can’t do too much damage. But a directly elected mayor, who sets up a political machine that keeps getting her reelected over a ten-year period, can do a great deal of damage.
And Kathleen Joan DeRosa did, in fact, do a great deal of damage. The damage Kathleen Joan DeRosa inflicted on this community is too well known to require extensive recapitulation here. Suffice it to say that Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disdain for this community is reflected in her opposition, and in the opposition of her fellow travelers and Donald Trump supporters, to Measure HH.
As much as I don’t intend to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the low points of Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s disastrous mayoralty, I don’t propose to spend a great deal of time recapitulating the merits of the charter, either. It’s not perfect, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey G. Gorshkov once out it, “good enough is best,” and the charter, with its faults, is good enough. As the New York World recommended Theodore Roosevelt for election to the presidency in his own right in 1904 with words of the immortal brevity: “Theodore! With all thy faults,” so too am I on record as supporting Measure HH by saying “yes on Measure HH! With all thy faults.”
Yet, if I find myself agreeing with our Gannett newspaper’s endorsement of Measure HH, I find myself regrettably forced to the conclusion that an editorial board that can see its way clear to endorsing a needful charter measure for Cathedral City cannot logically endorse the Council candidate who has made opposition to the charter his signature issue. I must conclude that this Gannett newspaper, which cannot seem to shoot straight, is once again making editorial decisions on the basis of its personal and institutional antipathies.
Three years ago, this Gannett newspaper tried its level best to embarrass Greg Pettis so badly that he would hopefully have been forced from office. Within weeks of Mr. Pettis having been installed as president of the Southern California Association of Governments, a powerful recognition of his notable service to the city, the region, and the state, this Gannett newspaper ran a breathless “exposé,” carrying Tamara Sone’s byline and consisting of information which those of us with some familiarity with Cathedral City’s political ins and outs knew immediately had been provided to her by Kathleen Joan DeRosa to form the basis of a journalistic hatchet job.
Tamara Sone, a relatively gullible and credulous baby journalist with skeletons in her own closet, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. She rushed into print with a breathless story whose evident purpose was to create a scandal that would force Mr. Pettis from office, put a journalistic feather in Tamara Sone’s cap, and gratify Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s burning antipathy, nay, her hatred, for Greg Pettis.
In rushing to print, neither Sone nor the editorial board which should have supervised her work bothered to do the slightest bit of fact checking or due diligence. These were shortcomings which I addressed in two posts in my blog which, I like to think, helped torpedo Ms. Sone’s career here in the Desert. The first, on Sunday, April 28, 2013, was entitled “Journalistic Malpractice: The Desert Sun’s Hit Piece against Councilmember Greg Pettis.:. The second, which followed on Saturday, May 4, 2013, was entitled “The Desert Sun’s Rabid Pursuit of Greg Pettis."
Not long after that, Tamara Sone left of the employ of our local Gannett newspaper. One might have thought after that that the powers that be at our local Gannett newspaper would have been chastened enough thought twice about invoking and trotting out these tiresome allegations to relitigate at a remove of three years. Perhaps our local Gannett newspaper thinks there has been enough voter turnover in Cathedral City that voters would be ignorant of its acts of malpractice three years ago. Unfortunately for our local Gannett newspaper, the memories of some of us in Cathedral City are long and unforgiving, just like those of our Gannett newspaper’s editorial board.
Because what is clear from our Gannett newspaper’s sorry endorsement of an unqualified candidate is 1) they are still carrying Kathleen Joan DeRosa’s water in the service of her visceral antipathy, nay, hatred, for Greg Pettis, and consequently 2) they are not really interested in the future of Cathedral City. Given that our Gannett newspaper is headquartered in Palm Springs, it is hardly surprising that it would have a somewhat Palm Springs-centric disdain for what is seen as the poor Latino majority community to its east, whose very incorporation it opposed back in 1982.
The editorial board did acknowledge, in endorsing incumbent councilmember John Aguilar, that Cathedral City is a Latino-majority city. Unfortunately, as they have done so often in the past, the editorial board was more interested in its antipathy toward Greg Pettis than it was in doing right by Cathedral City. Endorsing Espericueta is, in effect, a slap in the face of Cathedral city’s Latino community. There are literally scores of more qualified individuals from the Latino community who the desert sun could have endorsed, had those individuals stepped forward to run. But none of them trimmed his sails so closely to Kathleen Joan DeRosa, the sometime darling of this Gannett publication.
This Gannett publication allowed itself to be blinded by antipathy and by misplaced loyalty to a scheming politician who was able to trade for a number of years on her close personal relationship with the Desert Sun’s editor. Apparently, the editorial board feels that she still has markers which they need to pay, or some other form of juice at 750 N. Gene Autry Trail.
Either way, the Desert Sun’s endorsement of Sergio Espericueta doesn’t bear any kind of serious scrutiny at all. Voters would be well advised to cast their vote for the most qualified councilmember in the Valley, Greg Pettis, and not heed the ridiculous antipathies of the Desert Sun’s editorial board, whose conduct has been reprehensible.
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