Former Wilder political adviser Paul Goldman has been blogging over at NBC-12's political website for several weeks, though he rarely makes sense and is in dire need of good editor. Today, Goldman landed a series of punches on the various parties engaged in the absurd theater-in-the-round we know as Richmond politics.
If you've been around long enough, you might remember when politics in this town was relatively harmless, mostly amusing and certainly not worth putting on the front page of the newspaper every day. The days of Roy West and Leonidas Young and Chuck Richardson usually involved plenty of banter, sharp verbal jabs and the periodic criminal conviction. It's different around Richmond these days as the Mayor and the School Board throw sand in each other's eyes, as Goldman suggests through the metaphor of the Performing Arts Center (Don Harrison should be proud). The whole thing is worth reading:
Let's assume Henry Marsh has been elected mayor of Richmond in 2008.
Imagine that Mayor Henry Marsh and his aides then spent most of his third year in office claiming, without ever offering any proof, that they could save $1,000,000 in the next 12 months by throwing Jim Ukrops and the Arts Foundation Board out of the modernized Carpenter Center. Assume the City Council passed a law forbidding Mayor Marsh from doing it. But Mayor Marsh and his staff didn't care what the City Council, Mr. Ukrops, Gene Trani, Bob Farrell, Bill Godwin or had to say. After all, Mayor Marsh said: I gave them 25 million to build the Arts Center. The City owns it. No one can tell me who has to stay in my building.
Imagine further that Mayor Marsh and his staff had made sure the Richmond police were on hand to threaten innocent citizens with arrest in order to basically enable there private Moving Army, appropriately clad however in leotards, to take confidential files, documents and equipment of the Arts Foundation out of the Carpenter Center in the dead of night in direction opposition to a city ordinance. When Mr. Ukrops and his board showed up, they were humiliated by the police in front of the news media.
Imagine further still that Mayor Marsh had been so dismissive of an existing local law that a Richmond Court Judge had to get out of bed around midnight to go issue an extraordinary order telling Mr. Marsh to cease and desist immediately, or face possible arrest by the Richmond Sheriff's office.
Imagine...no, I take that back. There is no need to imagine anything.
Why? Because anyone who has lived in Richmond for even a few weeks, and prides him or herself on having any personal integrity, doesn't need to be told the reality of what would happen next.
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