Lifted from the biographical files of your Board of County Supervisors:
Zev Yaroslavsky proves that he flies higher who is not weighted down by the baggage of scruples. Last time I checked, Mr. Yaroslavsky held membership in two synagogues, one liberal, one traditional. Press 1 for Traditional Jew. Press 2 for Liberal Jew. This should niftily cover his entire Jewish constituency.
Yvonne Brathwaite Burke proves that a severe lack of scholarliness can convert one into a star.
Gloria Molina thanks God every day she was not born Gloria O’Houlihan. She proves the ethnicity flag remains a cinch winner in Los Angeles politics.
Don Knabe teaches that if you emulate the travel mode of a snake, nobody will notice you, the better to slide through life without all of those tiresome nudges draped around your shoulders.
Mike Antonovich kissed his wife goodbye one morning in the ‘90s. He has not been seen since. When the worried Mrs. A. telephoned the LAPD to file a Missing Persons report, she was told that a member of the County Board of Supervisors must be absent for 23 years before the cops will agree to vote on whether to organize a search party.
Has Anyone Seen a Spine Around Here?
I challenge anyone to name five more useless boobs in Los Angeles public life.
The Board of Supervisors is the most desirable cemetery in Southern California politics for wheezing hacks who are fatigued from playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, a beast Ms. Molina insists be bi-lingual. It is the only known graveyard where people go to flourish, not die.
If Ms. Bhutto had chosen to run for the seat of the mercifully retiring Ms. Burke in June, instead of trying to rescue Pakistan yesterday, she would be alive this afternoon.
No matter how much radar Al Qaeda or the Taliban possesses, neither would have found her.
The County Handbook tells me you need three qualities to “serve” on the Board of Supervisors:
Be intellectually downscale,
Be inherently lazy and
Be a whiz at Hide ‘n Seek. If you are lucky, the populace will forget your name and no one of any importance ever will seek you out.
And so, dear friends, we come to the Good Riddance Election on June 2.
Whether state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City) or Los Angeles City Councilman Bernie Parks captures Ms. Burke’s seat, it should be the last we see of the winner until his obituary turns up in the Los Angeles Times.
The Good Riddance Election is whatever the opposite is of a beauty contest.
Maybe then these race-obsessed gentlemen finally will quit bugging beleaguered voters to send them somewhere cushier.
What If Nobody Voted?
The downside is one of them will win.
The pity is that both the pro-business Mr. Parks and the pro-union Sen. Ridley-Thomas are unembarrasseable race-crazed personalities.
Make no mistake. They are running as black men, not as mere politicians.
No one — mark this statement — will waggle a finger at either gentlemen for running black because race is, and probably always will be, too volatile for civil discourse.
No Justification
Plenty of white politicians have run the same kind of campaigns, to exclusively serve fellow whites, to the total exclusion of blacks and others. So what?
Morally, it is reprehensible for someone formerly downtrodden to prove he can be as nasty as his onetime oppressor.
In the tradition of third-rate politicians, the loser of Ridley-Thomas/Parks will keep playing voters for fools in his incessant job hunt while imitating those ladies who get paid to have sex.
