Some post-Ike business we would've dispensed of earlier, had we not been forced to reboot this blog from sundry remote locations: Has there been such a rank display of political opportunism locally than that exhibited by county judge candidate David Mincberg in the commercial he began airing not too long after the hurricane's winds subsided? (We ask you ...)
You may have missed it if you've been without electricity, but the Mincberg campaign is so proud of its desperately exploitative gambit that it's posted the ad on its Web site. You can check it out yourself if you're supremely bored and actually undecided about whom you're voting for next month, but let us take the liberty of boiling it down for you: After lauding the "neighbor helping neighbor" attitude that Mincberg says prevailed after the storm (a true and correct assertion, according to our patented truth test), he adds the obligatory darkening note:
You understand Mincberg's frustration: he's got some money and here everybody's telling him that Democrats have a chance to take back the county and so forth and suddenly the hurricane rolls ashore and County Judge Ed Emmett is on TV with White every 15 minutes, both looking steady and confident and getting much favorable free press, while the sweaty-palmed Mincberg (who?) is relegated to stewing on the far sidelines. For his next foray onto the airwaves we'd suggest this private citizen-businessman provide the public with extended footage of himself actually helping a neighbor. Maybe he cleaned the debris out of an old lady's yard down the street, who knows ...
You may have missed it if you've been without electricity, but the Mincberg campaign is so proud of its desperately exploitative gambit that it's posted the ad on its Web site. You can check it out yourself if you're supremely bored and actually undecided about whom you're voting for next month, but let us take the liberty of boiling it down for you: After lauding the "neighbor helping neighbor" attitude that Mincberg says prevailed after the storm (a true and correct assertion, according to our patented truth test), he adds the obligatory darkening note:
But it's wrong that so many in the energy capital of the world were left in the dark, and now traffic's a mess.We don't immediately see the line connecting the dots of this being the energy capital and CenterPoint's inability to hit a switch and restore the power with something approaching alacrity, but we do know that Mincberg's phony promise to set "new standards in infrastructure to keep the lights on" would constitute an unprecedented expansion of the powers and purview of county government (... and he's a businessman, not a career politician ... ). The "traffic's a mess" declaration is also interesting---it's accompanied by a visual of a headline, or faux headline, reporting "It could be November before all traffic lights restored"---since the greater part of the stop-light outage persisted (persists) in the city of Houston, which we believe is run by Bill White, Mincberg's buddy (or maybe kinda-sorta buddy or even ex-buddy, since White wisely requested that Mincberg refraining from airing a commercial with White's visage).
You understand Mincberg's frustration: he's got some money and here everybody's telling him that Democrats have a chance to take back the county and so forth and suddenly the hurricane rolls ashore and County Judge Ed Emmett is on TV with White every 15 minutes, both looking steady and confident and getting much favorable free press, while the sweaty-palmed Mincberg (who?) is relegated to stewing on the far sidelines. For his next foray onto the airwaves we'd suggest this private citizen-businessman provide the public with extended footage of himself actually helping a neighbor. Maybe he cleaned the debris out of an old lady's yard down the street, who knows ...
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