Sticks and stones: Give ol' Al Lipscomb credit. The former city councilman may have been on the take, but at least he was always polite, a gentleman, even on his way to the pokey.
Apparently he didn't pass his good manners on to his progeny.
Testifying before the Dallas City Council last Wednesday, LeVar Thomas, Lipscomb's grandson, declared it time to "leash the dogs" on the council. He was referring to Laura Miller and Donna Blumer, the only council members demanding further investigation into whether police Chief Terrell Bolton arranged a meeting between a police and a strip-club owner upset over police enforcement at his club.
Their refusal to put the Bolton matter to rest angered a crowd of black ministers and activists who showed up to support the chief, Thomas among them. He denounced tactics he claimed unjustly "crucified" his grandfather. "Never again for the sake of peace in this city," he intoned, "will we allow another black leader to be criminalized by these same tactics."
(Here's a hint for Thomas: Jesus was crucified. A jury convicted your granddaddy of taking bribes. Only one of them is widely held to be incorruptible. It ain't grandpa.)
But Thomas didn't stop there. "As for this council's two self-proclaimed female watchdogs," he said, "Webster's [Dictionary] defines a female dog as a bitch!"
Blumer says none of the many ministers in attendance rebuked Thomas. "They acted, in my opinion, not very Christian," she says.
Good for them. For nearly four years, we've been doing our damnedest to lower the level of civic discourse to what you might find at a drunken domestic dispute at a trailer park, but with little luck. Frankly, we're running out of polite adjectives, but we have a whole slew of impolite ones ready to roll once things get mean-spirited and trashy enough for LeVar and Buzz--dickhead, for instance.
So you want to be a Buzz correspondent, eh? OK, take this little test. Say you just received an invitation "to celebrate D Magazine's new office." Do you:
A) Say to yourself, "Suh-weet! Free booze!"
B) Become paranoid and wonder why anyone would invite someone from this paper to anything, unless it was...a trap!
C) Mock D publisher Wick Allison for moving his offices to Oak Lawn from downtown, even though he's harped on downtown development as a key to Dallas' economic revival.
The correct answer is "C".
"We moved because it was a dump," Allison says in a message left for Buzz. "But you get what you pay for...You need things like elevators that work in a place of business."
--Compiled from staff reports by Patrick Williams
