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By Joel Thurtell
Was I on the money, or what?
Dave Bing, the Detroit businessman and onetime basketball star who pressured Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy and Jennifer Granholm to remove Kwame Kilpatrick as mayor of Detroit, now wants — guess what?
To be mayor of Detroit!
Gosh, what a surprise.
Anyone NOT see that move coming?
Okay, I’m going to steal a move from the Detroit Free Press and pat myself on the back. I predicted this one. Here’s what I wrote in joelontheroad.com on August 20:
And then there were those mega-business guys, Dave Bing and Pete Karmonos Jr. pressuring Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy to cut a plea deal with Kwame that would safeguard his law license but get him off stage so someone else could run the city with honor and dignity.
Who did they have in mind?
Journalists should never use “talk on the street†as a source for articles, so I won’t note that talk on the street had Dave Bing crowned as mayor to fill in the blank left by Kwame’s removal, should it happen.
The idea that a bunch of self-appointed business folk would interfere in a judicial proceeding is repulsive. Twisting the prosecutor’s arm, aided and abetted by trumpeting Detroit Free Press columnists, sounds to me like something akin to obstruction.
I’ll say it again: I’m no fan of Kwame. It wasn’t his affair with old pal and Chief of Staff Christine Beatty that offends so much as their apparent effort to cover it up by hiding text messages — love letters, really — that appeared to make liars of them and betrayers of the public that elected Kwame.
(Note my use of “apparent” and “appeared”? Unlike my rival media organism, the Detroit Free Press, I recognize that Beatty still faces trial and is presumed innocent till proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which so far the Free Press has not accomplished despite their inflammatory lingo.)
But what really offends me about this whole situation, and it includes that newspaper I just mentioned, is the way so many leaders — politicians, business people, preachers and, yes, self-styled journalists — jumped aboard the railroad highballing toward preventing a fair trial. (Remember that Beatty is going to try her luck with a jury, so there’s still plenty of opportunity for the media to louse that up.) That railroad was first the City Council’s try at a kangaroo cout, aka “hearing,” that would have tainted potential jurors for a criminal trial. And then that boneheaded move being forbidden, they persuaded the governor, no doubt worried about how Kwamegate might hurt Democrats in the November elections, to hold her removal hearing, which helped force Kwame to plead guilty. Granholm’s hearing was a sham, too, just another turn of the screw.
Once Granholm convened her hearing, Kwame’s chances at finding jurors with minds unpolluted by the media din were nil.
Due process?
This train was made in Detroit.
And now one of the chief promoters of the hearings and the prosecutor’s “deals” has shown us his hand.
Dave Bing wants the job he helped create.
Good luck, Dave.
But I gotta tell ya, those deft moves you had on the basketball court sure didn’t translate to politics.
I didn’t need a courtside seat to spot your self-interested motives.
Stealth, good buddy. Stealth.
You’ll need it in Detroit.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
