First, he said, the cops should be spending their time catching more serious crooks. Always a good thought. If a cop has got a poker player pinched by the ear in one hand and an airplane hijacker pinched by the ear in the other, he should always let the poker player go and concentrate on the hijacker.
That's not the good part.
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Dwaine Caraway will be missed by columnists. And probably dog-torturers.
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The good part was his second reason why the cops should lay off: He and his father liked to play poker at the house.
Oh my gosh! How embarrassing for the police! Had they only known this was the Caraway family's favorite poker house, all this might have been avoided.
Somehow, it gets better. Guess what? The cops laid off. I haven't been by that place in a while, but last time I checked the cars were still all over the lawn and the place looked like it was goin' and blowin'.
He says this crazy stuff, but he tends to get his way, and that's the part that keeps me in business. He may be bizarre, but he's news.
If it were only the things like giving the key to the city to Michael Vick or talking about Arthur and Archie and so on, I wouldn't be able to get much real mileage out of him. What makes Caraway worth paying attention to is that in the end, no matter how strange his pathway, he often winds up exactly where he intended to go.
Take his recent ethics reform push. It's been talked to death, but the basic concept is so wonderfully—how to put it?—so wonderfully Caraway.
With no public debate, he introduced a measure that he said would repair a grievous wrong perpetrated on citizens by an earlier ethics law. That law prohibited a citizen from giving council members money right after a council vote on something of importance to that citizen.
Caraway said the law was preventing a lot of people who wanted to give the council members money from doing so. The poor things. Wads of money in their hands and nobody to grease with it.
It's not unrelated to the poker house deal. The underlying principle is the same in both.
Hey, that's my poker house.
Hey, that's my money.
But again—and this is the more important part—it worked. The council voted unanimously to adopt the Mayor Dwaine Caraway Ethics Reform Ordinance.
They got caught, and there's been a good deal of blowback over it, so now the council has been forced to create some kind of commission to re-study the city's ethics policy. On the first day that the new commission convenes, they should have a professor come in and explain what ethics are.
But my point is this: The way Caraway has operated in office is only different from how previous mayors have behaved because the things he wants are different, and because he asked for them so loudly. Dwaine has learned a lot since his childhood in the projects, but he never mastered the country club rule of staying quiet and stealing big.
Leppert insisted that the taxpayers pay for a half-billion dollar hotel development that would enhance the value of a bunch of property owned by the people who own The Dallas Morning News.
Caraway just wants the cops to lay off his and his dad's poker house.
Leppert said the Corps of Engineers had "signed off" on the safety of the Trinity River levee system, and said the North Texas Tollway Authority was going to pay the two billion dollars it will cost to build a toll road along the river.
Caraway just said the cops came to his house because of Arthur and Archie.
Plus, Caraway just made life so easy. I am going to miss him in the mayor's office, terribly. In fact, I don't even remember. What time do people normally start work?
Since his swearing in, my life has been a lotus-eater's Nirvana. I loll in bed until early afternoon, eating grapes.
