Pete Waldmeir

Detroit mayor scandal: Enough is enough

Headlines in both The Detroit News and the Free Press this week said it all: "Finally".

Too bad it was only alluding to the Red Wings and the Pistons making the playoffs in their respective pro sports and not to the topic that is uppermost in the minds of most thinking residents of southeast Michigan: Mz Jenny has "finally" set the wheels in motion in Lansing to pull the plug on Kwame Kilpatrick.

Oh, don't get too excited. Jenny's guy has met the Detroit City Council's guy to talk it over. And the ground rules are being set and the procedures agreeed upon, etc., etc. But rest assured, the NBA and NHL finals likely will be long over and the new seasons for those teams well under way before Kwame gets his day in any court, let alone gets the hook from our intrepid Democrat governor.

Frankly, in my opinion, whatever happens six weeks or (more like it) six months from now, Kilpatrick is the 2008 remake of Dead Man Walking. His goose has been cooked, his career has been folded, stapled, spindled and mutilated. He is road kill.

The pity is, however, as Kwame and other high profile Detroiters go, so goes the reputation of the city where I grew up.

So far the guy has shot himself in both feet, the knees and both arms with his post-indictment statments and actions. The only safe portion of his anatomy that's gone without a scratch seems to be his groin.

Virtually assuring his front-runner nomination for the 2008 Lock The Barn Door After the Text Message Is Stolen trophy, last week Detroit's youthful chief public official decreed (yes, King Kwame decrees) that henceforth all text messages transmitted on city-owned, taxpayer-billed cell phones and other electronic doo-dads will be the private property of the senders/receivers.

Presumably, he then texted his mystery hot tub companion, Ms. Slowsky, and jetted off to Texas "on city business" without giving the court or even his probation officer/keeper notice of where he was going until after he was gone. This, of course, infuriated the local Detroit judge, who said blah-blah-blah, promised to make Kwame say five Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys and admonished him to write 100 times on the blackboard, "I will never dump on the court again (unless some good looking turtle happens to ask me to fly to Texas on city, or any other, kind of business)."

My hope is that the mysterious Ms. Slowsky is a Detroit resident. At least one Detroiter will be getting their money's worth out of the guy.

When Richard Nixon got wrapped up in the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and lied about it, The Detroit News was the first major daily paper to demand his ouster in a Page One Sunday editorial that bore the headline, "Enough is Enough."

Here we are 30 years later and that still tells the story pretty well.