[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]You may disagree with me, dear reader, in my critical assessment of President Obama’s first three months, or with Frederik Sisa in his placement of the importance of family in our culture or with Earl Ofari Hutchinson in primarily faulting the social fabric of America last month when an ex-con, on the lam, mowed down four cops in Oakland.
If you disagree with all of us instead of some of us, you probably just have escaped from a hospital. Call 9-1-1 when you next see a pay telephone. They are hunting for you.
Every day when you open this newspaper, you are served a blooming bouquet of unpredictable and starkly differing viewpoints, in contrast to the single-note voice found in the fastest-failing newspapers across America.
A rainbow of perspectives is as scarce as profitability in these newspapers, and they serve up piping-hot, irresistible samples nearly every morning.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, recently has tabbed the reporter Mike Finnegan as its designated hit-man for the spring season.
Missing: Mike’s Moral Compass
Mr. Finnegan is a left-winger, hard-core. Like a typical straying husband who drinks, he cannot keep either his hands or his opinions to himself.
A few weeks ago, he was assigned to a media story on the supposedly approaching death of conservative talk radio in Los Angeles. The story contains fully as much truth as “global warming.” He botched it the way I probably would have covered a beauty contest if my least favorite former wife were one of the finalists.
Labeled a news story, Mr. Finnegan kept inserting “I hope,” “I hope,” “I hope.” Either he, his editor or both should have been punished for the bloody hatchet he wielded.
Mr. Finnegan’s latest wild stab at investigative reporting turned up on Saturday morning’s front page.
Like a first-time daddy, Mr. Finnegan wailed to the top of his faith-‘n-begorrah voice about the wild, seemingly out of control spending by one of Sacramento’s balmier legislators, Gil Cedillo.
Before Gov. Schwarzenegger was elected, state Sen. Cedillo, from East L.A., was best known as California’s most influential advocate for awarding driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
Mr. Finnegan, we said “illegal immigrants,” not your swishy, left-wing corruption of the language that holds illegals should not have their feelings hurt. Therefore, you and your kind hold that illegals and their fragile psyches only should be publicly referred to, silkily, as “undocumented.”
He Sins Everywhere He Goes
In the blaring assault he uncorked on Mr. Cedillo’s spending habits, Mr. Finnegan noted that the morally cross-eyed legislator has spent $125,000 of campaign funds in sprucing up his looks the last six years, especially when it came to catering to his sensitive tummy.
Mr. Finnegan showed that Mr. Cedillo’s unharnessed vanity drove him to blow $77,000 on restaurants to impress new and old friends, $29,000 on hotels and $21,000 on airline tickets.
And this former po’ boy ain’t nearly through. In less than six years, he has raised $1.2 million in campaign funds even though his next vaguely tough opponent will be his first one.
In a month, on May 19, the now-pockmarked Mr. Cedillo is running against Eastside Assembly-person, Assembly-man, Assembly-girl Judy Chu for the seat formerly held by perhaps the lightest weight lady in Mr. Obama’s semi-inner circle, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.
Ms. Chu, who does not live on Tobacco Road, is no bargain, either. She has a political resume that only would impress Helen Keller, Stevie Wonder or the incurious Americans who voted for Mr. Obama last autumn. Only against Mr. Cedillo does Ms. Chu look as if she is a candidate for Mother Superior.
Admirably, Mother Superior has not spent 10 cents of her campaign funds on shopping or entertainment, and a pittance, less than $5,000, on restaurants and travel in the last six years, according to the selective Mr. Finnegan.
Having wreaked as much damage as one debatably grounded legislator should be allowed to cause, the fairly disgusting Mr. Cedillo is reaching out for a new perspnal shopping mall — the Congress in Washington.
Let’s Heave on the Count of 3
If someone will please douse the lights. Now, ignite every candle on that luscious chocolate cake to complete the scene for hitman Michael Finnegan’s boffo punchline.
If you are like 100 percent of voters, you probably are influenced by negative stories.
Since the newspaper spreading this bad-news story about Mr. Cedillo loathes Republicans, you would presume Mr. Cedillo is a member of the Grand Old Party. After all, politicians from the left and right spend our money as if it were theirs’.
And so, the never-delivered punchline is that the dishonest Michael Finnegan and the dishonest Los Angeles Times could not clear space anywhere inside the nearly 1300-word piece to tell readers the scoundrel Cedillo is a Democrat.
My golly.
I am stunned.
What can a mother do but wring her wet, weary, bony hands?
