Are We All Kissey Face, Now?

You know it’s bad when former Supervisor Shirley Bianchi has to drive down from Cambria to bang heads together.  Which she did at Tuesday’s Supervisor’s meeting, telling the Board she intended to tell them to put on their big boy pants and get control of the snarky public who still has nasty things to say about her boy, Bruce Gibson, and his messy love life that’s spilled all over the Board, often turning them into collateral damage. 

But, she was too late.  Chairman Paul Teixeira had his pants on and told the public that they had to mind their manners during public comment or he’d stop the meetings and clear the room.  He also reminded the audience that the meetings were being televised and streamed and podcasted so everyone was to “keep it clean, this is a family show.”

All of which was a reaction to last week’s dust-up wherein Los Ososian, Tom Salmon, made reference to Gibson’s girlfriend/legislative aide in terms using the word “whore” and “prostitute,” which made everyone’s head explode and caused Tribune reporter, Bob Cuddy, to write a column about the chamber turning into a Blogosphere filled with anonymous trolls.

And so there it sits, for now.  But you just gotta know the Supervisors aren’t happy with this mess.  Gibson plopped this dead rat onto the dais and left it there under their noses.  What could they do?  Legally, little or nothing.  Gibson successfully gamed the system to make sure both he and his girlfriend/employee kept their respective jobs, the Board’s own waffling Code of Conduct Standards apparently has no enforcement teeth, so what can individual Board members do?  Give the guy a Brooklyn raspberry at the start of every meeting?  Make evil, threatening gang hand signs at him before the Pledge of Allegiance?

I mean, there’s no way to get rid of the mess since it’s now been legally formalized with a few strokes of the pen , blessed by County Counsel and politely accepted by the silence of the Board.  So, there’s no way to get rid of Gibson or his mess.  Until the end of his term, there he’ll sit, canary feathers sticking out of his mouth, Cheshire Cat grin on his face.  And there no way to stop public comment on the issue since the County has made it clear that system-gaming is allowed for certain kinds of people, and that is a move that can only continue to anger many citizens (and county staff) who feel that this game has been gaming them.

So there we are, week after week, the dead rat on the dais and it smells and everyone has to move their papers and coffee cups around it and keep a sharp eye out for members of the public who, at any given moment, can slip in a stealthy dead-rat reference that gob-smacks the Board right in their Big Boy Pants, and so eyes roll and everyone thinks, “Jeeze, I didn’t sign on for this crap,” and then looks at the clock, counting the hours until lunch.