Thursday, May 31st, 2007...7:38 am
Note to Bureaucrats: If You Are Going to Threaten a Lawmaker, At Least Make It Good
Finally, a reason to tell this story. There is a story (probably apocryphal) about a former Tucson City Councilmember that will remain nameless whose wallet was found after a police raid on a local house of ill-repute. The next day, the Chief of Police called him into his office. The wallet was returned, the story says, with few words spoken. That councilmember then became a staunch advocate for all of the Police Department’s budget requests.
Once in a while, a lawmaker can get led around by the nose if someone in the bureaucracy “knows something” about them.
Jonathan Paton and Pete Hershberger had dueling op-eds in this Sunday’s Star regarding the current CPS controversies (here and here). Their argument comes down to this: how do you balance the need for oversight with the need to keep certain buisiness of CPS confidential?
So, Paton gets a threatening letter from a staffer of the Foster Care Review Board. The writer claimed to have damaging information about Paton. What was this information? Was Paton in his pre-political existence a gay porn star named Chad Dangling? Was he pals with the Menendez Brothers? Or maybe they had Polaroids of him partying with Hugo Chavez at George Soros’s house? Was he the bozo that cancelled Veronica Mars?
Nope. The writer claimed to know about Paton’s traffic tickets. Yep. The man’s political career will be over.
I’m struck by how inappropriate this is, but I’m even struck more by how clumsy it is. If you are going to go and threaten someone with damaging information, at least make sure it is damaging. We know that Paton is a bit of a press hound, so at least make it a good enough piece of dirt that he won’t give the Star a call.
NB - You know, I used to think that Paton vaguely looked like Craig Scanlon, the long time guitar player for the Fall that was fired in 1995 for “failure to maintain amps and slovenly appearance.” But, in the picture in the Star, he looks more like Gary Sinise. So, Sinise as Harry Truman, or Sinise as George Wallace?
5 Comments
May 31st, 2007 at 8:40 am
Do you think that this looks like a case of attempted blackmail of Rep. Trish Groe by La Paz County Attorney Martin Brannan? “Nice little legislative career you have there, Trish. It would be a shame to have anything happen to it. Now, about that legislation …”
May 31st, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Glad to see another Fall fan in AZ. 50,000 of us can’t be wrong, right?
May 31st, 2007 at 4:09 pm
I got the impression that e-mail to Paton was not a threat, but rather a demonstration of how little confidentiality remains in our society — even for state legislators. The text of the message seemed to include no theat, stated or implied.
More interesting to me in this incident is why Paton chose to bring this to the attention of the media and to represent it as if it were a threat?
May 31st, 2007 at 4:28 pm
A DK fan here also in our midst, Jello?
June 1st, 2007 at 8:39 am
It was clearly a threat from what I read. I have a hard time understanding how it couldn’t be interpreted that way.
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