Briefing Book: GOP — Grand Old Pettiness

Written by J. D. Piro
Thursday, 26 January 2012 01:00

When the bad news hits, politicians hit back — at the media. Judging from the organizational meeting of the Lewisboro Town Board, our politicians are no different, especially when they act all noble about it.

For sheer entertainment value, nothing in town can rival the petty spectacle put on by GOP Councilmen Frank Kelly and Peter DeLucia. These Town Board Republicans interrupted the monotonous routine of the otherwise pedestrian organizational meeting to engage in an amusing, if overwrought, colloquy about whether The Lewisboro Ledger deserved to remain the Town Board's official paper for posting of legal notices. (We won't keep you in suspense — we do, they decided, but apparently we're on double-secret probation.)

Messrs. Kelly and DeLucia, it seems, were troubled by The Ledger's local coverage. Both politicians disparaged The Ledger's coverage during Hurricane Irene and "Snow-lloween." They faulted The Ledger's management for its business decisions. They slammed The Ledger for its "sensationalized" reporting of the Friedlander murder/suicide. They lauded The Journal News. And last week, Mr. DeLucia demanded that The Ledger end its "divisive political rhetoric." Well.

Here at Briefing Book, we can only smile and shake our heads. And rather than offer a Reagan-esque "there you go again" to their admonishments, we'll quote Newt Gingrich and ask these two excitable gentlemen to "please spare us the pious baloney."

The town government did not raise so much as one comment or criticism of The Ledger's coverage at any time during or after Hurricane Irene or "Snow-lloween." If the Republicans were sincerely interested in improving the ability of the town government to communicate during an emergency, they might have shown some interest in discussing those improvements during 2011 rather than at their first meeting of 2012.

Moreover, the communication "solutions" Messrs. Kelly and DeLucia offered — posting notices on community bulletin boards during blackouts and having The Ledger publish "special editions" that would be obsolete the instant they hit the streets — would work really well if this were 1985 and the Internet were still a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. As it is, we can put their "solutions" on the same list with nationalized cellular phone service, part-time town supervisors, pool cabanas, lifetime pool passes, and other loopy ideas offered by the Lewisboro GOP.

It's rather odd, though, that Mr. DeLucia would condemn The Ledger's reporting on the Friedlander tragedy while promoting The Journal News, which provided fairly lurid, explicit, and even intimate coverage of that quadruple murder/suicide. We won't speculate as to the motives for suddenly injecting the Friedlander tragedy into the discussion. We'll simply assume, charitably, that Mr. DeLucia and Mr. Kelly haven't read The Journal News for the last few months.

If the Republicans were really interested in ending "divisive political rhetoric," they had their chance on Election Night. Traditionally, that's when a losing candidate concedes defeat, congratulates his opponent, and urges his supporters to support the people's choice. And here's where our ability to give the Lewisboro GOP the benefit of the doubt is just about exhausted.

Despite trailing by an insurmountable margin on Election Night, then-Town Supervisor Charles Duffy refused to concede defeat. Instead, the Republican Town Committee spent weeks indulging in the fantasy that the supervisor's race was undecided. An announcement to that effect remains on their campaign's website, which was still active as of Jan. 5.

In fact, with more than 85% of the vote counted on Election Night, Mr. Duffy had just 43% of the vote. He would have had to win the remaining votes by more than a statistically improbable 2-to-1 margin to have had even a whisper of a prayer of eking out a razor-thin victory.

Given the churlish refusal of the mathematically challenged GOP to accept defeat graciously, we can't honestly say that we were surprised when GOP Chairman Wayne Coluccini issued a letter on Jan. 5, 2012, that contained barely two sentences congratulating Mr. Parsons on his inauguration (not his election) and several paragraphs recycling the Lewisboro GOP's leftover campaign literature promoting Mr. Duffy's tenure as supervisor. The Republican chairman's letter congratulating Mr. Parsons may be found on the GOP's still active "Team Lewisboro" website. Just click the link that reads "Duffy's Hard Work Put Lewisboro on Right Path."

The Republicans need to face facts. It's 2012. It's over. They lost. They need to move on, before they start sounding like those Japanese soldiers who were found in the 1970s still fighting World War II on some God-forsaken Pacific island. Lewisboro will never get ahead if the Republicans keep trying to get even.