Priding herself on being, arguably, the best informed, the most enthusiastic, the most aggressive interrogator/watchdog on the City Council, the predictable Meghan Sahli-Wells on Monday committed the No. 1 rudimentary sin for a politician:
She failed to prepare.
In so doing, she needlessly embarrassed herself.
The cops she repeatedly insulted on Monday were not impressed by her obligatory performance yesterday.
She lathered the department for having too many white guys – astonishingly while staring at a score of rainbow-colored cop faces in the front rows.
As if she could not control her thoughts.
Obtuseness? Ignorance? Unquenchable anger?
What was it?
Hardly the demeanor of a disciplined politician.
It was not as if Ms. Sahli-Wells had been goaded or tricked into an argument.
She barreled straight into her diversity propaganda with both hands behind her back.
She apparently had failed to check how amazingly diverse Chief Scott Bixby’s department is.
If she did know the numbers and still unleashed a tirade, shame on her.
Otherwise, what is her excuse?
Wandering about as if she were stranded, hopelessly lost in a dark forest of tall, sun-deprived trees, Ms. Sahli-Wells, the most progressive Council member, deliberately waded into a diversity debate without knowing the facts.
She resembled driving down the freeway blindfolded at 90 mph.
An objective observer would be forced to judge Ms. Sahli-Wells’s notion of diversity as extreme.
Repeatedly, in varied settings, she has stressed that having people of a certain color and certain gender transcends qualifications, whether in the Police Dept. of the Kitty Clean-up Dept.
Can her sad, victim-centric thinking be more upside down?
How ironic that after Ms. Sahli-Wells completed her “clarification” walkback yesterday, Mayor Jim Clarke thanked Chief Bixby for, err, supplying the Council with the diversity data on what must be one of the most ethnically mixed agencies in American law enforcement.
But when eternal victimology is central to the philosophy you live by, how could the play-out have been different?
