Life in the Land of Dreamy Dreams

Detroit is taking a page from Nagin’s songbook.

 In Mayor Kilpatrick’s state of the city address:

DETROIT — Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick lashed out at his opponents and the news media at the end of his 70-minute State of the City Address on Tuesday. He accused them of creating a “lynch mob mentality” in the scandal over his exchange of sexually explicit text messages with a former top aide.

He said he could not leave the auditorium with his wife and son sitting there without addressing the media storm that has followed his administration.

Detroit broadcasters, the mayor implied, are putting their own quest for ratings ahead of his family’s safety with their intense coverage of the scandal.

“I have to say this because it’s very personal to me,” Kilpatrick said. “I don’t believe that a Nielsen rating is worth the life of my children or your children”

You might remember that he’s in trouble not so much for having an affair but for costing the city millions in a whistleblower scandal. Nagin hasn’t sunk quite that deep, but just last month there was a big whoop-de-doo about his schedule and the man just has no internal appropriateness of scale sensor.

Exerpt from an interview with a local news channel who FOIAed his previous year’s schedule because…well…those of us who live here would like to know where the hell the man is. He doesn’t seem to be out and about except when he’s raising campaign funds for some unannounced future ambition. (emphasis mine)

oh, btw- I’m not sure how the Ayrians come into it, since the police chief is also black.

Nagin: My disappointment is the way some in the media are handling me personally … Our local newspaper, for example, had me pointing a gun at the police chief. This got all over the Internet, all over the nation, and is now sitting on the most racist websites in America. Hate groups now have that picture, so now I am personally more at risk and my family is personally more at risk.

And I’m a little upset with this station cause you advertising about the ratings, about what’s getting ready to happen with my schedule, you put my personal schedule out there, I am coming back to the station and me and your news director are going to be outside in the parking lot having a good one on one. You do not put my family at risk.

Eric Paulsen: This was a schedule from last year, though.

Nagin: I don’t care. That schedule has formal stuff on it. It has patterns on it and now you have these Aryan race people focused on me and we’ve got some mental cases out in this community and you’re getting ready to put my schedule out there. Where are the other elected official’s schedule? Are you going to do a follow up on that? This has gone beyond the point of reasonableness. … I am sick of this.

The punchline to all of this is that the National Conference of Black Mayors was supposed to have their convention in Detroit, but instead decided to move it here, because our guy is so much better than theirs.

Anyway, here’s my absolute favorite part of Nagin’s rant:

And somebody approach me wrong, I’m going to coldcock ‘em. That’s the bottom line. You can come with that foolishness if you want, but you’re going to see a side of Ray Nagin that you haven’t seen.

In case you’d like to see Mr. Chocolate City really fired up, here’s a link to the video.

And here’s commentary on his oh so daunting schedule.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS