Carey's Notion - Blame it on the Aristocrats

It's old news by a day, but I am sure most of you are aware that Carey has decided not to seek a second term as borough mayor.  It's been a rough first term for Dave: hiring inexperienced and unqualified people and giving them huge pay raises; having his chief of staff getting caught in a questionable business deal with the borough; getting blasted by the out-going emergency manager for the Mayor's inept running the borough; flip-flopping on most major decisions; palling around with terrorists (Schaeffer Cox and the North Road Militia) and the open-carry crowd; and having students tell him that cutting funding to KPC wasn't a good idea.

So, Dave has bowed out of the race.  It's a tough job and certainly one where it is impossible please everyone.  But rather than bow out with grace, honor and self-respect, Carey, in his official statement that you can read here, chose to take a paranoid approach and assign blame to various bogeymen for his failings. 

First, and in typical Carey fashion, he wraps himself in the American flag as if he has sole ownership and understanding of what it means.  The implication is, of course, that if you disagree with Dave, you are not patriotic.  When he had the fire hydrants painted red, white and blue as Mayor of SOLdotna, I wondered if it was still OK for dogs to pee on them? I guess this will be the last Progress Day parade where Dave carries a 49-star flag and lectures us all about it.

Dave is also proud of getting 64% of the vote when he was elected borough mayor, but of course there are lies, damn lies and statistics.  The voter turnout was dismally low when he ran, so another way of looking at it is that about 66% of the eligible voters didn't vote for him. 

Using some Carey-logic, he concludes that it would be unethical and would give him an unfair advantage to seek re-election while currently serving as mayor because he was elected to serve everyone. As mayor, he might make a decision these next few months that could make people happy, so that would go against his vow to God.

Huh?!? 

It is my understanding that as a politician, if you can make good decisions most of the time, that becomes a reason to seek re-election.  Then you can stand on your record of accomplishments and an opponent would have to have a darn good reason to run against you.

Right now, four people are in the race because they think they could do a better job.

Then Dave blasts the 'aristocrats' on the previous borough assembly.  Aristocrats?  Like Gary Superman, a North Road bar owner?  Pete Sprague, a retired mailman?, Ron Long, a small-business owner from Seward?, Paul Fisher, a half-asleep assembly member?  Or maybe Millie Martin, the grandmother from the south peninsula?  None of these folks meet any definition of aristocrat, but they do all have one thing in common, they (maybe with one exception, sorry PF), are a heck of a lot smarter than Dave.  And they, with one exception (sorry again, PF) had the audacity to challenge Dave when Carey would make a bone-head move. In other words, most of them (yep, let's leave PF out of this one too) did their job.  Most all would try hard to follow Robert's Rules of Order when conducting assembly meetings, something Gary K, the current assembly president, should experiment with.

Carey goes on to tout the mantra that defines a simplistic political solution to problems that we have here in Alaska and the US - the government spends too much. All right, already.  But what to cut?  If you don't think some service is necessary, someone else does. So, when Dave proposed cutting funding to KPC, despite a voter mandate to provide that funding, students, faculty and other concerned citizens protested, just like that Paul Revere guy shooting off bells and warning the redcoats.

How did Dave respond?  He hired a lawyer to intimidate those young punks that were intimidating him.  And then Dave gives the lawyer a plug in his statement.  Isn't THAT unethical?

Dave directs his final paranoid delusion towards Gary Turner, the head of KPC.  The assembly has an ordinance to consider that would prohibit politicians from being on the payroll of an organization that receives borough funding. That sort of makes sense - you don't want conflict-of-interest issues to come up.  It's all about ethics, of course. It could appear that some quid pro quo was in effect by steering money to some entity while that entity paid you.  What's funny here is that Dave was trying to cut funding for KPC and at the same time, wanting to stay on that gravy train.  It just came back to bite him in the ass.

But don't expect Dave to really understand ethics or ethical behavior.  Maybe a few years in the seminary is just what the dude needs.