Rebuttal to the Rebuttal (aka We Should Both Get a Life)
Dobbs Ferry, New York
Rob Mintzes wrote an excellent piece on GroundReport attacking the invocation of Republican demagogues like Karl Rove (aka Turd Blossom, Boy Genius) to discredit card-carrying Democrats. Though I don’t agree with all the allegations he leveled at the Dobbs Ferry Democratic Committee (aka the Bolshevik Cell of the People’s Republic of Greenberg) , I am grateful that a citizen journalism web site (aka the silly blog) gave him a venue to repeat his version of the truth.
What Mr. Mintzes does not appreciate is that before the invention of the silly blog (aka GroundReport) dissident or original voices (like his) in Dobbs Ferry had no outlet. Before GR, public opinion in Dobbs Ferry was controlled by a small group of self-selected people – the Dobbs Ferry Party, a powerful and ruthless Village administrator, a well-connected Republican Village Attorney, some Lieberman plutocrats masquerading as Democrats (aka liberal Republicans) and the unelected editor of The Rivertowns Enterprise.
These people could censor, filter and spin the ‘news’ to fit their personal agendas and they did. The only opposition to these forces of laissez-faire development and runaway patronage was the misfits in the Dobbs Ferry Democratic Committee.
I remember my first brush with the Dobbs Ferry Party. I was new to the Village and was told by people that I trusted that I should vote for certain individuals, which I did, because the Democratic candidates were a bunch of crackpots (aka tree huggers, radical environmentalists), but most importantly, anti-fields.
At that time, the Village was sharply divided between the pro-fields people and the anti-fields people. Pro-fields people could be trusted because they embodied the core values of Dobbs Ferry. Unfortunately, I discovered, after a long inner struggle, that I was an anti-fields person because I love to walk in the woods, have an interest in lichen and, once in a while, like to experience a snippet of silence.
At that time in Dobbs Ferry, when you declared yourself anti-fields, it was like stepping off a social cliff. Don’t get me wrong. I think it is important that the Dobbs Ferry Free Union School District offers 34 different sports teams for a total population of 1,400 students. Having tennis, golf, wrestling, football, base ball, softball, basketball, soccer, track and field, volleyball and now lacrosse at all levels from modified to varsity for both sexes is not a luxury, but a necessity of Village life.
When I learned that my daughter Kate was a talented speed walker and that she had no proper track on which to hone her skill, I was devastated. But you know all of this because you were the best sports journalist in the history of The Rivertowns Enterprise.
Once I had come to accept that I was anti-fields, and that I couldn’t change who I was, I had no choice but to align myself with the other maladroits in the Village like Meredith Viera who consistently supported the anti-development candidates of the Dobbs Ferry Democratic Committee.
See the other difference between the DFDC (aka at least some of us) and the DFP and its Republican allies is that we don’t think the market is efficient. We think that the market (aka real estate developers) is driven by individual short-term greed, not the long-term interests of the Village as a whole (aka the Landing that ironically produced Randy Klipstein, the James Carville of the DFDC).
Accordingly, some of us are against the ‘destination’ stores that the editor of The Rivertowns Enterprise finds so appealing because Ashford Avenue cannot sustain any more traffic. We are definitely against giving away Village property to real estate developers to accommodate a Super Stop & Shop box store. We questioned locating the new DPW next to a man-made, unstable cliff – the new DPW is still not open due to these safety issues.
But I digress into issues of substance. Finally, in politics, it is gratuitous to accuse the other side of dirty tricks. Everybody in politics resorts to or is forced to resort to dirty tricks. When I ran for Trustee and lost, the employees of the DPW were told by the former Village administrator that, if elected, I would eliminate their jobs.
I was also accused by the DFP ‘fact checker’ of lying on my resume (aka I was NOT a founding member of the Dobbs Ferry Schools Foundation, shameful). Although these were blatant lies, they stuck, because in politics repetition is more important that the truth. Barack Hussein Hussein Hussein Hussein Hussein Hussein Hussein Obama versus John Sidney McCain
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