The more things change . . .
As with the summer sun and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, any hope we average citizens have for a brief respite from the various odious excrements we must constantly smell seems as fruitless as a cheap bottle of imitation juice.
When Ty Masterson interrupted his no-work-for-plenty-of-pay Koch-funded job to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination, we thought there might be at least a brief pause in his commercials, paid for by big-money interests out of state. But they’ve come back with a die-hard vengeance, once again using half-truths and Photoshopped pictures to portray his opponent as Wicked Witch of the East.
When Roger Marshall stepped out of his palatial Florida home, redocked his Titanic campaign to his tiny vacation cabin in Kansas, and again secured the Republican nomination for Senate, he replaced his old shtick of sticking up for the president with new rhetoric about Democrats being Commies. And candidates further down the ballot followed suit, bridging over to a new game of “no Trump.”
It’s enough to make a committed Republican like me worried whether the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and revered regular reader Nancy Kassebaum won’t be flipped out of existence like the Whigs that the party replaced.
It’s not as if the political heat has let up locally. A clerical error in presenting extension budgets may require costly republication of revenue-neutral notices. Somehow, Marion workers managed to break a gas line, forcing evacuation of Homestead Senior Residences. And Peabody, where the city council sometimes seems to resemble a cage match, once again has a vacancy after authorities were called to two disturbances involving a now-former council member.
It’s not as if people aren’t trying. Peabody had a special meeting Monday to try to learn about openness in government. Too bad the meeting itself was called illegally, without a motion to go into executive session during a regular council meeting.
We don’t know about the resignation there, but we imagine the meeting error, the error on revenue-neutral notices, and the gas-line rupture in Marion were equally inopportune accidents that befell dedicated, hard-working people who would be well-advised that fessing up usually makes forgiving easier.
One of the reasons such big windfalls are being paid to various people over the infamous police raid on our newsroom three years ago is that no one fessed up and instead tried to cover up.
Encouraged by elected officials, law-enforcement authorities called a wrong number, misheard an answer the way they wanted to hear, ignored known facts and KBI recommendations, asked to search for something they already had and knew where it came from, encouraged others to avoid exercising checks and balances, then exceeded the authority of their ill-gotten warrants to put on what they bragged was the biggest raid in city history — all for suspect, political purposes and unfortunately leading to a death.
A week afterward, everyone from the governor’s office down knew it shouldn’t have happened, but further arrest warrants were drafted, and the chief who led the raid wasn’t suspended for weeks despite being under investigation.
It wasn’t until nearly a year later that we were officially cleared. By that time the city’s lawyers were arguing that laws police broke weren’t really laws that needed to be followed because there were no legal precedents related to the case.
Fessing up might have led to forgiveness, but when two years after the raid other officials continued to deny wrongdoing and accuse us, not their predecessors, of being bullies, the only thing anyone could do was sue.
I can’t speak for former employees and government officials who have sued over the raid, but I can say that money is merely symbolic for me and the paper. Whatever we win will be donated anyway. The important thing is that truth be told and that the disavowed techniques used in the case be discouraged in future cases involving other news organizations.
This is likely to be a costly lesson, but the paper and I are doing everything we can to make sure taxpayers don’t end up having to pay a plug nickel for the misbehavior of people they thought were representing their interests and were supporting, as all officials claim in their oaths of office, the Constitution of the United States.
It may be fall before the summer sun lets up. It likely will be after President Trump is out of office before Iran does. But we all hope that continued turmoil three years after the raid will soon come to an end and that Marion can become not the city where rights were violated but the city where a few rogue government officials weren’t allowed to get away with sullying the entire town’s reputation by trampling on the Bill of Rights.
— ERIC MEYER