[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Mystery bulletin from the Police Dept.:

As if last June’s 86 percent no-confidence vote in the Police Chief had slithered down a rabbit hole or been written in disappearing ink:

The Police Union, chafing because their heralded campaign to dump Don Pedersen ran out of fuel as it reached the starting line, is going to try again.

A second no-confidence vote is scheduled for Tuesday.

The stated objective is unknown.

Is this like having two wedding rehearsals in case the marriage doesn’t work?

The union leaders have been trying to revive their virtually stillborn drive to force out the Chief — for a sprinkling of personal charges that impressed no one — but the baby ain’t making a sound. The supine infant ain’t giving any hint of being the first Culver Citian to return from the dead in an odd-numbered century.

A year after a tiny clutch of cops, the board of the Police Officers Assn., went semi-public with their rebellion, little seems to have changed in the culture of the department.

One departnment veteran told the newspaper this afternoon that Union officer Brian Fitzpatrick “looks as if this process has aged him 10 years.”

A couple months ago, Mr. Pedersen, in the middle of his fifth year, passed his 50th birthday without incident. He was supposed to be gone by then, according to the union’s master strategy.

If a leader cannot fulfill his mission without magically making followers, achingly true believers, materialize, this so-far abortive campaign of the Police Union’s may be the precise latter day illustration of:

Mission Impossible.

If last early-summer’s first (?) no-confidence vote was a test of where the loyal troops are going to line up, why haven’t 86 percent of a supposedly unhappy department been able to drive Mr. Pedersen into the sea?

The not-so-difficult answer appears to be that the He’s Gotta Go boys more accurately have a following of 8.6 percent.

If the Good Guys supposedly won the first no-confidence referendum from here to City Manager John Nachbar’s old home in Kansas, isn’t it a little risky to run the same gantlet twice?

What if, counting the allegedly intimidated, the favorable response climbs to 98 percent?

That, dear readers, could mean the Union’s True Believers’ true count is 9.8 percent, which, not at all ironically, precisely matches America’s desperate unemployment rate.

Ah, if only Confucious were alive. We could email him this afternoon for a wise interpretation.