D.C. disaster: The return of Marion Barry

A headline at the top of the Washington Post’s op-ed page advises – even orders – readers: DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR WARD 8.

And what is Ward 8?

It is in the District of Columbia, where voters have just selected as the Democratic nominee to the City Council the worst mayor in the history of human civilization, Marion Barry. (The action virtually assures Barry a seat on the Council.)

Marion as mayor was the hugely oversexed user of illegal drugs who was caught snorting in the hotel room of a voluptuous young woman who was not his wife. When he was sent to jail, Mayor Barry was caught in the visitor’s room receiving oral sex from another woman.

His return to public life, at the will of the majority of voters in Ward 8 evoked a notable comment from Northern Virginia Republican Congressman Tom Davis, who has introduced a bill to provide D.C. a full representative in the House, rather than a non-voting delegate. Davis told USA Today: “Barry’s return to city government probably doesn’t help.”

That must be the understatement of the year – although Rep. Davis added:

“The further you get from Anacostia (Ward 8) the more adverse the reaction.”

Understandably. For although we have had a president who used an intern for oral sex in the Oval Office, there is no record that he or she were at the same time using illegal drugs like Mayor Barry in that strumpet’s hotel room.

But the Post’s black militant columnist Colbert King exclaims: “Time Out!” And he goes on to write:

“Any attempt to use Marion Barry against the District ought to be opposed with all the vigor that this town’s 550,000-plus residents can muster. Barry’s victory is the business of District residents. It falls to voters in Ward 8, not members of Congress, to hold Barry accountable for everything that he does or fails to do while in office. Congressional tampering with the District’s powers of self-governance because of disdain for one legislator of a 13-member city council is ludicrous and offensive and, if carried out, would be an example of Capitol Hill bullying at its worst.”

If anything is ludicrous, it is Marion Barry and his wild defender, Colbert King.

King writes: “I don’t share Barry’s politics or his extracurricular interests, and I have said so emphatically in dozens of columns. But I do respect the voters who cast their ballots for him. Congress should do the same.”

And why should Congress respect these voters, who brought back into public office this incomparably bad public official?

Well, claims columnist King, “some of us still have a hard time understanding why voters in Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District keep returning furniture salesman Mark Souder to Washington, since that Republican from northeastern Indiana seems chiefly interested in repealing gun control in the nation’s capital to make it possible for Washingtonians to carry handguns on the job and at home and to have an unlimited supply of semiautomatic weapons.”

It is interesting, in contrast to this gun-control rave, that Washington, D.C., has one of the toughest gun-control laws in the nation. Is the D.C. rate murder and other gun crimes low?

By way of further appeal to Congress for a full-fledged member of the House (and if that ever passed, a push for two U.S. senators – one surely Marion), columnist King roasts House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as “a pest control operator” who “spends much of his time in Washington shaking the money trees where lobbyists hang out, when he’s not hammering wayward Republicans.”

He even compares DeLay to Marion Barry. He goes on to denounce a congressman from Tennessee – as well as the voters of Connecticut because of the resignation of the governor and the imprisonment of the former mayors of Bridgeport and Waterbury (none of whom have been re-elected to public office since their misbehavior).

This incredible columnist will get no full representative in the House or, as America’s first city-state, any U.S. senators without the highly improbable vote of Congress – which columnist King has insulted, so foolishly.

That, Mr. King, is also called democracy.