Influence and Shades of Gray

With less than 48 hours until it's all over but the counting, it looks like our young jailer/mayor's campaign is struggling as he approaches the finish line. He and his running mate, Wendy Leece, have had to resort to distributing lie after lie in their campaign literature in an attempt to manipulate the voters of this city. Many reports have been circulating around town that there's a pronounced uptick of support for Bruce Garlich and Mike Scheafer. Now Mansoor's boss, Sheriff Mike Carona, kicks the mayor's campaign in the teeth with his letter to the editor in the Daily Pilot yesterday, in which he discourages any plan by Orange County municipalities to attempt to duplicate the Sheriff's immigration screening plan, which he considers an unnecessary redundancy.

Simultaneously, a fellow who posts a blog here in town and resembles my theoretical character, Your Neighbor, published yet another of his racist rants on a couple of the far right-wing web sites that he supplies with his putrid prose. The publishing of this particular essay seems like curious timing, since he's been keeping a fairly low profile during the campaign to, apparently, avoid further contaminating the Mansoor/Leece effort. It didn't work.

This latest rant, once again, bemoans what he perceives as the homogenization of our species - especially as it affects the American gene pool. In this essay he has resurrected his term for that homogenization - "Tan Everyman". This is the term which, when used in one of his early essays nearly a decade ago, caused such a firestorm of controversy and unleashed the full fury of civil rights organizations around the country. At least one such organization has a huge file on this guy, apparently considering him and his viewpoints to be particularly dangerous and worthy of special attention. Since he frequently adorns his essays with swastikas, it's easy to understand why those organizations feel he should be watched.

This time he chronicles example after example of the "tanning" of the gene pool, and not in any terms that could be considered favorable. It's obvious as you read his bilge that his philosophy can be stated quite simply - "If it ain't white, it ain't right."

You will recall that Your Neighbor has been a major supporter of the Mansoor/Leece ticket, using the full force of his blog and his exceptional writing skills to perpetuate their lies and urge their election and to denigrate their opponents. You can read more about Your Neighbor here, here and here. Through all his hate-filled rhetoric I find myself amused by the fact that his "fair-haired boy", Allan Mansoor, is an example of precisely what this guy repudiates - the blending of genes from light-skinned groups with those of a darker persuasion. Mansoor's mother, as the mayor has told us many times, is Scandinavian and his father is from Egypt. The result of that union has produced a good looking guy - misguided, ill-advised, easily manipulated, but a handsome young man.

It must really grind Your Neighbor to have to use Mansoor as a tool in his plan to expunge the Latinos from our city. Based on things he's written, I expect he'd much prefer to have some big, blond Aryan stud to be his standard bearer. I can think of no better example of the old axiom, "Politics makes strange bedfellows."

Your Neighbor and Mayor Mansoor tend to view life in black and white terms. They fail to recognize that few things in life are black and white, but shades of gray. Our young jailer/mayor has recently denied any association with, nor influence by, Your Neighbor. However, the facts refute his denials. As I've said regarding this issue before, denial is only denial, it's not truth.

As the voters enter their polling place to cast their ballots, I hope they will remember the kind of support and influence our young jailer/mayor and his running mate have received. They are the darlings of Jim Gilchrist and his frothing Minuteman mob - outsiders, who have contributed huge amounts of money to the mayor's campaign. I hope the voters will not forget Your Neighbor and his insidious philosophy that has formed the cornerstone of many of the mayor's actions during his term.

The residents of Costa Mesa deserve much better than this. November 7th gives them the opportunity to tell the world that our city will not become the bastion of intolerance that the mayor and his supporters have tried to make it. It's time to cast aside those who would turn the clock back a half century and have our city resemble the deep south at a time when burning crosses and men parading in white sheets represented the attitude of the times. Not here, not now - never again!