Wednesday Mailbag

A reader wrote us with a response to Sunday's post about former Claremont Assistant City Manager Bridget Healy's long range plan to grab a spot on our City Council:

DATE: Tue, February 1, 2011 10:09:26 AM
SUBJECT: [ No Subject ]
TO: Claremont Buzz

That's the saddest, smallest, most desperate little thing I've ever seen in print. There are living beings who devote conscious thought to a long-term plan to get Bridget Healy elected to the Claremont City Council? Is there nothing better to do with that time and energy?

I mean, seriously. I hear Match.com is pretty useful.

That note was followed by this post script:

DATE: Tue, February 1, 2011 8:16:56 PM
SUBJECT:Re:
TO: Claremont Buzz

And why on earth does Bridget Healy *want* to be on the city council so badly? She has a six-figure pension [$166,000+ per year - ed.] -- she can't take that and ride her broom into the sunset?

Why indeed? We're in complete agreement with our dear reader. Isn't it enough for Healy to have her prosperity guaranteed at taxpayer expense while the great majority of the rest of the workforce labors on without the safety net of a generous pension indexed for inflation?

We're of the mind that Healy can't help herself. She's so driven to seek power over others that she absolutely has to be on our City Council, even if it's to the long-term detriment of our town. She can't help herself. She's the scorpion in the old frog and scorpion parable. (Here's one version that tale that weaves game theory into its interpretation.)

That leaves the voters who would forget Healy's many transgressions in the position of the frog. The naive among us - and Healy's betting there are enough to get her friend Robin Haulman elected this year followed by Healy in 2013 - invariably forget the scorpion's sting.

The game theory piece we found ends with this judgment:

The human dilemma is that all progress ultimately fails or at least slides back, that anything once proven must be proven again a myriad of times, that there is nothing so well established that a fundamentalist (of any religion or stripe) cannot be found to deny it, and suffer the consequences, and then deny that he suffered the consequences.

And Healy, along with the core of her supporters, the holdovers from Preserve Claremont's 2005 smear campaign, are nothing if not fundamentally devoted to their sad religion.