Shameless self-promotion

Last week Mayor Ragsdale presented his 81-page response to the p-card audit

In case you missed today's Shopper-News, here's a piece I had some fun with. I call it "The Knoxburg Address."

(Rendered with sincere apologies to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, our greatest President)

The Mayor speaks:

Four score and one page ago, I brought forth to this county a new audit response, conceived in desperation, handsomely bound, and dedicated to the proposition that all receipts are created equal, especially mine.

Now we are engaged in a great political war, testing whether that response, or any response so conceived can long endure without being turned over to the Attorney General. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war, the small assembly room, because it could only be booked for 30 minutes and I don’t want to answer questions.

We have come to dedicate a portion of this response as the final resting place for those who gave their livelihoods that I might survive. It is altogether fitting and proper that I should do this, because the Hospitality Fund audit is due any time now, and I need to seek out more scapegoats.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow my audit response. The staff members – canned or still employed – who struggled on my watch have consecrated it far above my poor power to add or detract, at least until their lawsuits are settled or charges have been filed.

The county will little note, nor long remember, what I say here (although the New York Times may), but it will never forget what we spent in my office at the Palm Restaurant or Fedex Kinko’s. It is for us, the still employed, rather to be dedicated to the unfinished work of getting me out of here and into the governor’s chair without an indictment hanging over my head.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – how to weasel out of audit reports yet to come – that from my former staffers we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – their jobs.

And I here highly resolve that Requitta Bone, John Werner, Margie Loyd and Cynthia Finch shall not have “resigned” in vain, that this county shall have a new birth of scandals, and that this government of me, by me, for me, shall not perish from Knox County until 2010.

Comments

[bird_dog]

I certainly got a kick out of this! Except for daily Sudoku, I mostly subscribe to the KNS for the Monday Shopper, Thanks.

[Larry Van Guilder]

BD: Thanks much. We all need some humor in this situation.

LVG