I've Said it Before, and I'll Say it Again

Of course Commission meetings aren't really the way I describe them.  How could they be?  Who would ever behave in public the way I describe some Commissioners?  I was going to say who, in their right mind..., but that brings us to a different discussion.

No, it's all quite unbelievable.  It's impossible.  Not only are my descriptions contrived, but I make up the quotes to go with them.  You know that's true.  You don't even have to come to a Commission meeting to know how absurd are the things I say.  For example, suppose I said I was making a public comment at the last meeting, and Noah Jacobs told me public comments, "Good and Welfare," have to be upbeat and positive, and there's a rule that I'm not allowed to criticize anything.  Now you know I'd be lying if I said such a thing.  Noah would never say anything like that.  He doesn't just sit there and make stuff up.  Or suppose I said Noah, after a year and a half on the Commission, as Mayor, didn't know that in Biscayne Park, people are allowed to park on the swale, and they do it legally all the time.  Suppose I said he claimed he was recently told by some unnamed person that we're not allowed to park on the swale, and he simply assumed this was true, blindly and mindlessly accepted it as true, not even needing to check it out for himself by reading the Code, or asking the Manager, or the Code Enforcement Officer, or the police.  Wouldn't it be obvious to you that I was inventing terrible assertions about Noah, and that such foolish ideas and approaches were inconceivable in him?  Of course it would.

So do yourself and your neighbors a favor: come to some of these meetings.  I'll still make up the nonsense I do, and you can write comments exposing how off base I am.  You can tell it the way it really, really is.

Come on, show me up.  And have fun with it.  I'm all yours.  I deserve to be taken to task for the untrue things I persistently say.  Bryan Cooper repeatedly says I'm a liar.  And his friend Steve Bernard said it before that.  They wouldn't say that about me if it weren't true.


Addendum:  Chuck Ross has corrected me.  He sent me a recording of the Good and Welfare section of the meeting, and he demonstrated that my language above was not precise.  When I think my language is precise, either because I commit something to memory or write it down, I put it in quotes.  I did not do that above, because I relied on the impression I took from the experience.  What Noah actually said when he interrupted me was that Good and Welfare should be confined to topics that "benefit the Village."  This appears to be his own idiosyncratic assumption, and it appears that he does not consider a suggestion to recover $5500 to Village coffers to be of benefit to the Village.  Again, that's his opinion.  He backed down, however, when I suggested that Good and Welfare is traditionally used for audience members to comment on agenda items, and he conceded that the minutes of the 2/5/13 Commission meeting were in fact an agenda item.