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If political embarrassment moves through emotional stages, just as grief does, then Warren Mayor James Fouts has gone beyond anger and denial.
He's now feeling humiliation, or should be.
Neal Rubin, a Detroit News columnist who's adept at sniffing bupkis (a Yiddish word for goat or sheep droppings), ridicules Fouts for claiming his crude remarks on newly released recordings are "an expensive, far-fetched, needless and thoroughly unproven dirty trick," in the journalist's words.
Did you hear what James Fouts says now?
Rubin takes him down Wednesday with merciless mocking:
Fouts claims . . . he’s the poor, innocent victim of slander, character assassination, and a few other things nearly as nasty as what we all heard in those sound bites from Motor City Muckraker. He says Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel is orchestrating a devious campaign against him because of their dispute over dumping at Freedom Hill Amphitheatre in Sterling Heights. . . .
The mayor of Warren wants us to believe he’s being ambushed over a few piles of dirt.
The price tag for that ambush, if in fact there was one, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Either that, or you’d have to find an incredibly talented comedian willing to sacrifice his career and risk getting sued or even prosecuted — again, over a few piles of dirt.
So that’s one possibility: an expensive, far-fetched, needless and thoroughly unproven dirty trick. The other possibility would be exactly what it sounds like: Jim Fouts, writing yet another check with his mouth that his rump can’t cash.
The columnist hammers further on Facebook, linking to his column with this riff:
Let's assume the technology existed to flawlessly impersonate someone in audio recordings. Let's further assume that for the first time ever, that technology was used to attack and discredit somebody.
Who would you expect to be the victim? The chancellor of Germany, maybe? The CEO of ExxonMobil? The president-elect of the United States?
Nah. They're small change. According to Jim Fouts, this imaginary technological cannon is being aimed at the mayor of Warren, Michigan.
Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson, a friend, comments on that thread: "I smell KGB."
As for us, we wonder when -- or if -- the banged-around mayor will reach the acceptance stage in the progression of political embarrassment.
Earlier coverage:
