We've got to hand it to the Guardian. Just when you think Bruce Brugmann's boys and girls have lost it -- that they don't have a single conspiracy theory worthy of a good belly laugh left in them; that all you can look forward to in the paper's pages are turgid, overlong articles on last week's committee meetings or prods to jury duty (seriously) -- they come through.
Witness the latest piece of glorious Guardian reasoning: Its bizarre assertion that Public Defender Jeff Adachi has links to the Tea Party.
Mind you, the paper doesn't come out and just say it like that.
The effort to paint Adachi as a sleeper agent of America's lunatic right
is couched in the ever-so-subtle interrogatory mode. To wit,
the headline: "Is Adachi's pension reform a Tea Party initiative?"
Uh, no?
The Guardian, an organ of the city's extreme political left whose work was once characterized by New York Times media columnist David Carr as "progressive knitting," has it in for Adachi over his efforts to craft modest legislation to reform public employee pensions in San Francisco. That much is clear.
From there on, however, we lose the thread of this incisive look at the Tea Party's ties to Adachi, who, by the way, is a Democrat, and whose pension-reform campaigning has been funded by other Democrats. The rationale for the accusation is never revealed; in fact, the words "Tea Party" appear only in the Guardian's headline and in Adachi's response to their queries about his anti-pension evilness. We are offered this observation by local union leader Gabriel Haaland:
"The problem is that pension reform has been blowing on the anti-public sector worker winds that are blowing in Wisconsin and other states, whether progressives want to acknowledge it or not," Haaland continued. "There is a reason that Adachi got so much money last year, and the corporate interests behind him are part of this effort to bash public sector workers."
