[img]2928|right|Mayor Eric Garcetti||no_popup[/img]When Eric (Pardon, My Mind Is Empty) Garcetti lightly was elected mayor last year by inattentive voters, his mandate was succinct:
To prove that Los Angeles could be governed by back-to-back featherweights without shrinking and tumbling into Ballona Creek.
By many accounts, the last time Mr. Garcetti’s latest intersection with reality was in 1972 on his second birthday. The problem is not that he grew up in a gilded existence. Rather, that he was raised – he never did grow up – in a gilded world where he failed to grasp any of the required tools for leading a useful life.
Give him ballet slippers, at least one, a tutu that should have been sent to the dry cleaners, and Mr. Garcetti will be a contented manners until the next do-gooder nudges him out of his daze. He could walk into this room when the floor is soaking wet and fail to leave an imprint.
Is he mayor or a cloud who wears a suit?
Comic Books Not in Sight
Over the weekend, Mr. Garcetti peered up from his book du jour, a thousand-page volume on philosophers who have toured the moon, and appeared at one of the LAPD’s worst ideas:
The annual gun buyback exercise that allegedly makes cerebrally stillborn cops and politicians pat themselves on each other’s backs until callouses emerge.
This dopey progressive notion looks better on paper than when homo sapiens act it out. The idea is for bad guys or their mouthpieces to turn in their broken-down weapons in exchange for gifts ranging from $100 to $200.
Charlie Beck, a midget among the nation’s police chiefs, reported that 369 handguns, 228 rifles,140 shotguns, 41 assault weapons were handed over to cops who giggled at the uselessness of some firearms. That is half as many as the LAPD collected last December.
Ah, said Mr. Garcetti, as he swallowed another gob of sooty downtown air. Now our formerly fearful citizens can stroll dark streets in any nasty neighborhood confident they may emerge intact.
What he really said was classic hollow Garcetti graffiti:
“The gun buyback gives Angelenos the opportunity to make our city safer by taking these guns off the streets so they don’t fall into the hands of criminals or children.”
Mr. Garcetti had to elevate his voice because throughout East L.A. and South L.A., he was being drowned out by contrite criminals confessing their sins to the nearest priests.
Thank you for saving us, Mr. Mayor.
