This pretty much sums it up for King Kwame!
IN OUR OPINION
Mr. Mayor, Enough!
July 26, 2008
What's that old saying about when push comes to shove?
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Well, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has just pushed things too damn far. Enough already.
Mr. Mayor, for Detroit, for Wayne County, for the entire State of Michigan, which has been dragged into your mess: Shove off.
It's over. It's got to be.
Kilpatrick has lost it. His mental fitness must be called into question. He should have been thrown in jail for shoving a sheriff's deputy, and he sure as hell should not be telling anybody else what to do these days.
If he won't resign, the mayor ought to offer a public apology -- for whatever that's worth -- and explain to the city's children that police officers have a job to do and must be treated with respect. Then he should take a leave of absence at least until his preliminary hearing on felony charges in September. Let him stay in the Manoogian. It'd be a small price to pay to keep him away from the levers of power.
"Irrational" is how 36th District Court Judge Ronald Giles described Kilpatrick's assault on a deputy who was trying Thursday afternoon to serve court papers on a friend of the mayor. Good for Giles to finally take real charge of the mayor's criminal case Friday, after weeks of swaying in the hot air from Kilpatrick's defense team. The judge set a thug-like cash bond for the mayor, subjected him to random drug tests, and generally dressed Kilpatrick down for incredibly bad behavior. In short, he treated the mayor like the criminal defendant he is. About time.
Maybe now Kilpatrick's $700-an-hour lawyers will get serious with Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy about some kind of plea to end this nightmare, which has yet to reach even the preliminary hearing stage. Trial? Likely into next year. Cost? Millions of Wayne County tax dollars that could be put to so much better use.
With a cloud hanging over the City Council because of its own scandal on a sludge contract, there's a big ball sitting in Gov. Jennifer Granholm's court, too. The council asked her to use her constitutional power to boot the mayor; Granholm, ever judicious, has set up a legal procedure for decision-making. It is at least on a faster pace than the mayor's criminal case, but nothing official can really begin to happen until after Labor Day, and this, again, is going to take time and money from a state that has so many other major needs for its resources.
Even as Granholm's quasi-judicial cogs are turning, she ought to be privately leaning on the mayor to do everybody, including himself, a favor and quit. Whatever she may think of the legal grounds for removing him, Granholm can't be happy about the mayor's public conduct, the paralysis he has inflicted on Detroit and the damage he is doing to Michigan's image. Next time he calls to ask for a meeting on Cobo Hall, she just has to say: "Mr. Mayor, what's the point? I've been asked to sit in judgment of you. We have nothing else to discuss unless it's how you can spare us both a lot of grief."
There are other prominent Michigan Democrats who kept silent too long. Surely they can see the damage that Kilpatrick could inflict on the party's chance to carry Michigan in the presidential race. Isn't it time to give him the message?
There are Detroit-area business leaders who grumble privately about what Kilpatrick's continued presence is doing to the city. Yet for reasons that can no longer be valid -- if they ever were -- no one but Dave Bing has been willing to go public.
What are folks afraid of? More pushing and shoving? Is this going to be allowed to drag on until the '09 city elections, still more than a year away? Is everyone really content to let the criminal case "run its course," which means Kilpatrick dragging it out as long as possible?
What happens in the next episode of "irrational"? It's a scary thought.
