[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]While the world’s only known drag queen running an Arab government, the lovely Moo-Moo Gaddafi, who wrote the Cow-Cow Blues for the pop group the Cowsills back in the ‘70s, milks Libyan banks dry and cooks a few patties before being shot out to pasture, he is one of the few people County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas doesn’t want to trade places with.
I felt a measure of empathy for him at last night’s community meeting on the oil field. Half of the crowd wanted his scalp. The other half volunteered to dash away and fetch the closest scissors.
He is one of America’s most soberly dedicated politicians, the kind who give the oily calling a gilded sheen. But in this case, he is shoveling against the muscular tide, which never finishes second in a race against man. The tide doesn’t cheat when it eats the way Mad Michelle does.
Not even the craftiest politician of the last 50 years, President Reagan, could baloney his way through this legalistic fog that can force a star to look feeble.
Don’t Hold Your Breath. You Will Die.
When the oil drilling dispute reaches the true denouement stage, Mr. Ridley-Thomas’s unborn grandchildren will be pushing walkers around their unmade beds in a nursing home.
I was thinking of him two nights ago when I went for a third piece of Diane’s spinach pizza. One of us may have overreached.
He can emerge from this remarkably muddy legal mess with a smile but I doubt as a clear-cut winner. He only will escape from this bramble bush relatively unmarked if he hands out a thousand dollar bill to each member of each audience at the monthly meetings he is proposing.
He is possibly the smartest and irrefutably the most eloquent person in Los Angeles government. Yet his present conundrum is analogous to a stone blind man being handed a copy of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition. His splendid assets ain’t doing him any good.
The Obviously Proper Move, but…
In the late summer of ’09, a few months after coming into office, he took a long-anticipated plunge by winning a fairly pro-forma approval from fellow Sups to aggressively revisit and ultimately rehabilitate the set of regulations his feathery lightweight predecessor classlessly rammed through at the end of her splattered term.
While conceding it was the unavoidably correct move morally and politically — two branches that seldom intersect — this also falls into the category of Hit Me Again. He took the principled action. If I were him, though, I would plan a series of uninterrupted incommunicado vacations, starting tonight, in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio, pledging not to return until espying keen evidence of climate change.
The gentle but dynamic, heavily principled man I have come to know and respect is standing in an inescapable hole. Instead of dropping down a ladder, the humorists in the crowd are contributing short-handed shovels.
I have not seen the man I know the last two community meetings. He said he was low-key — dialed ‘way down — last night because the matter was so serious and he wanted to establish an exactly appropriate tone.
He was himself only in bursts last night, not at all until he removed his suit jacket and eventually felt comfortable enough to crack wise, which he does better than nearly everyone.