My Take on Kwame Kilpatrick : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

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Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

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My Take on Kwame Kilpatrick

Posted on: March 25, 2008 7:35 PM, by Ed Brayton

I was asked to write a commentary on the situation with Kwame Kilpatrick, the mayor of Detroit, for the Michigan Messenger. You can read it here.

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Bwwwwaaaaa: a post after 9:30am??? It's a vampire!

Seriously though, while I agree Kilpatrick needs to go, I sort of disagree with the "One thing I learned a long time ago was that you cannot simultaneously accept responsibility for your actions and blame others for the consequences of those actions." part. I agree insofar as, pragmatically, doing this is very unlikely to ever fly as a PR tactic to mollify those that want an apology.

The thing is though, I think as a general point, it almost always blame for all sorts of things is shared: social and political events are almost always chain causality, not tracable back to one person or action.

This certainly doesn't apply at all to Kilpatrick's case, because I'm not sure I see how anyone that did anything wrong at all OTHER than him. It's just a general point against what was a general statement: way too often in scandals and screwups, when people defend themselves as not being 100% to blame, they're often right. No one ever wants to hear it from them of course: it's something that only other people can safely say.

Posted by: Bad | March 25, 2008 8:49 PM

What's the over/under on how long it takes before Worthy (the prosecutor) announces that Beatty's flipped and has agreed to testify for the prosecution and against Kilpatrick in exchange for immunity?

Posted by: Dan | March 26, 2008 7:56 AM

1. In some fairness here, I will point out a remark made by former prosecutor Jennine Pirro from Westchester County, NY, on the VanSusteran program. Ms. Pirro said that prosecutors are generally very reluctant to bring perjury charges against individuals for lying in civil cases because if they did so, they would be spending all the resources of their offices prosecuting such cases. Obviously, prosecutors have more important cases involving violent crime to concern themselves with.

2. In this regard, I would point to comments made by California attorney Gloria Allred after the O. J. Simpson civil case in which she demanded that Mr. Simpson be charged with perjury, based on what she considered to be lies told under oath. Of course, the Los Angeles District Attorney had no desire to, in effect, retry the O. J. Simpson case yet again and declined to do so.

All of this comes under the heading of prosecutorial discretion as no DAs' office has the resources to try all possible cases of alleged criminal activity.

Posted by: SLC | March 26, 2008 8:56 AM

Very good commentary.

Prosecutorial discretion is an interesting thing, and potentially subject to abuse, but when someone lies blatantly enough and long enough, a prosecutor may well find it necessary to act simply to change the atmosphere and say, "This lying is not OK."

It's tiresome when investigations result in no convictions for any of the criminal activity that's targeted, but get many of the participants for lying. Nonetheless sometimes it is necessary, if investigators are to have any clout.

Posted by: Henry Neufeld | March 26, 2008 9:19 AM

Now if he could just be convinced to resign now so the city can heal and move on. Unfortunately, his "apology" and actions indicate otherwise. This egotistical nightmare of a mayor earned this indictment and the only victim here is the city of Detroit.

Posted by: JoH | March 26, 2008 9:39 AM

And he's hired a defense attorney from Chicago; who has been all over our news trying to deflect the blame on those who "illegally" posted the text messages. Gee...nothing corrupt has ever happened with a Chicago politician!

Posted by: Rev. AJB | March 26, 2008 11:17 AM

SLC:

Normally I'd agree with you that if prosecutors don't normally go after perjury in civil cases, they shouldn't go after it for an elected official, either. On the other hand, this wasn't just any civil case; the heart of the matter at hand was illegal conduct by an elected official.

Honestly, the obstruction and misuse of office charges are far more important to me - but they might as well charge the perjury, too, since they're already prosecuting him. (On the other hand again, does it make a difference to the perjury case that the jury apparently didn't buy a word of it?)

As far as his defense - I had to laugh the other day when I heard Kilpatrick talking about how he's going to be "completely exonerated". Sure, if they're successful in getting the text messages excluded, he's likely to be acquitted - but there's a far cry between "acquitted because the smoking gun was excluded as evidence" and "completely exonerated", y'know?

Posted by: Cathy W | March 26, 2008 7:00 PM

From the commentary:

He sounded like he was ready to accept full responsibility...But we have heard this before. We heard it during his reelection campaign in 2005, in the wake of several previous scandals, when he said that he had "learned a valuable lesson." Yet it was after he made that declaration that he ended up being indicted on felony perjury charges.

I was appalled when Kilpatrick was re-elected. It's identical to college coaches like Kelvin Sampson, Jim Harrick, and Rick Neuheisel--by saying the magic words, "I've learned my lesson," they con people into trusting them again.

Personally, I'm not that trusting. What else would a con man say except, "Trust me?"

Posted by: James Hanley | March 27, 2008 5:29 PM