As he always does, Kevin Burns had designated attack Chihuahua, County Board Member Mike Donahue, leap to his defense in the face of my scurrilous and completely “unjournalistic” blog assault.
You see, Donahue has always fancied himself to be the one individual who can back me down – this is about his sixth go at me – but that title already belongs to my wife.
C’mon! It’s Mike Donahue! He’s just another slightly below average guy who was born into better circumstances only to mistake that tail wind for talent. Mike! Please keep the insults coming because they really do make me laugh.
Folks! This is nothing more than quintessential bully behavior. People like Burns and Donahue love to snigger as they execute their schemes under a cloak of anonymity, but when they get caught and have to face the music, then they shriek and wail as if they’re the real victims.
The truth is, Mayor Burns has made so many enemies and generally behaved so poorly that people have been coming to me with stories for years. And sadly, most of them have turned out to be true.
The irony is, the only reason I came across the police reports of which I previously spoke, is because I was FOIAing something else entirely. Sometimes you get lucky. The problem is, the rest of the press around here barely makes the minimum effort.
I don’t think Brenda Schory can even spell FOIA.
But even though county board member Donahue accuses me of having to look up to see the “bottom rung of the ladder,” unless something like the mayor’s infamous campaign emails went public, I tended to let sleeping dogs lie. Kevin Burns does enough damage to his own reputation that he really doesn’t need my help.
Ah! But when you’ve been warned and you go after my reputation anyway, that’s another story entirely. And what’s the best way to stand up to a bully? Give him a dose of his own medicine.
Burns told Sarkauskas to ask Bob McQuillan whether I was his campaign manager just to see if he could get Bob to blow up in public. As those embarrassing county chair campaign emails clearly described, that was his “plan” to “take down” Chris Lauzen all along.
After all, it takes a great deal of class to refer to your opponent’s wife as a “beast.”
So yes! If the Mayor insists upon going the underhanded route, there will be consequences as there well should be. Of course, if the other papers chose to practice some real journalism they’d already be running the stories.
You know, that’s a nice picture. I think I’m going to use that again on Facebook. My current picture makes me look like Regis Philbin.
Mike,
I’m glad I could be of service!
Jeff
I won’t argue the below average point (although my mother is likely to take issue with it), but you clearly have the wrong impression about the “tail wind” I supposedly grew up with. My dad went bankrupt in ‘81. My parents divorced the same year. My mother never remarried and she worked meager jobs to pay rent and get health insurance until she could qualify for Social Security and Medicare. My dad never recovered financially. There were more failed marriages and he currently lives with his fifth wife in a trailer in Yuma, AZ, destitute but for the government checks. I graduated from college in ’84 with a mountain of student loans that took me 10 years to pay off. As a young couple my wife and I took on mortgages, car loans and a boat load of consumer debt and we both worked full time while raising two kids to pay it all off, which we finally did in 2004. Since then, free of the debt, I have been fortunate to achieve a degree of financial success on my own with the backing of no one. Being below average, and all, I had to take giant leaps of faith in myself knowing that if all else failed I had my wife and kids there to support me.
Jeff– Brenda Schory was filing FOIAs before you were out of high school. Don’t play fast and loose with the truth, m’boy–it will come back to bite you in your ass!
Don,
First, I appreciate you doing your best to make me seem younger than I really am, but the truth is, I’m 54 which means I’ve FOIA’d with the best of them.
And second, I’ll be the first one to say that Brenda has her good days, but sadly 99 percent of them are in the distant past.
Jeff