RALPH BAILEY: Mettler tearing out pages from the Joe McCarthy playbook
| Friday, May 07 2010 02:01 PM
Last Updated Friday, May 07 2010 03:02 PM
I can't tell you when my obsession with the Kennedy clan began but it was so early and deep I was one of the few fifth graders who knew Joe McCarthy by name. Most Kennedy bios allude to Joseph Kennedy's friendship and admiration for the fellow Irish Catholic politician. So it was no surprise when Mrs. Flynn assigned me to write about the infamous Wisconsin senator.
Jump in the time machine with me some 37 years later and local Assembly candidate Ken Mettler, preparing to go on "The Jaz McKay Show," stops by my desk to lecture me on how wrong I was about McCarthy in a recent radio rant, providing me a biography detailing how "Tailgunner" Joe was a good American maligned by the media.
To say I was taken aback would be like saying Paris is OK in the spring, the Grand Canyon is pretty big or Michael Dukakis shouldn't have put on that Army helmet!
I had never heard anyone, let alone a school board trustee, make the case for a man who built a career on dirty tricks and deceit. Mettler insisted Joe was a hero who rooted out communists in the Pentagon, which was ignored by the liberal press. Yet he ignores that McCarthy not only lied about his military rank, insisting on the stump he entered the Marines as a "buck private," but also forged a commendation letter he wrote and later claimed Admiral Chester Nimitz signed and wrote!! Not to mention the mountain of falsehoods and innuendoes he spread to crush the lives of many innocent Americans during his communist witch-hunt in the 1950s.
When I recalled the Mettler defense of this hideous man, the light suddenly grew bright! The birth of Mettler's political career was mirroring that of "Tailgunner" Joe, who got the name as a "gunner observer," later insisting he made 32 missions to qualify for the Distinguished Flying Cross when in fact he made only 12.
Much like McCarthy, many of Mettler's well-documented issues were simple political dirty tricks. Things like monkeying around with a political sign, which did not constitute vandalism, allowing him to skirt criminal charges. It may not have been criminal but a grown man messing with political signs certainly was whackadoo!
Then we read about and watched a video where a 50-something Mettler was willing to throw fists with a young man old enough to be his son in the defense of Proposition 8 political signs in 2008. It may not have been criminal but it certainly was whackadoo!
And finally he was caught on video insisting he didn't know Shannon Holloway, who just days later would concede she not only met Mettler but was encouraged by him to run for the 32nd District Assembly seat as part of a "strategy," presumably to fool the voters with the two candidates with the same first name ... Shannons Holloway and Grove, giving Mettler the advantage.
Whackadoo!
Sophomore and silly, however, turns to mean-spirited when Mettler, in pure McCarthy-like fashion, attacks the woman who captured the lie, calling the local grandmother in a recent radio interview a "political operative" whom he accused of harassing and stalking him and trying to sabotage his campaign.
The grandmother and Grove supporter tells me she's meeting with a local attorney to consider charges of slander. She insists she never harassed him and in fact on the night in question, Mettler had dinner with her family at a public event at the Petroleum Club.
Regardless, it is crystal clear Mettler has torn several pages out of the McCarthy political playbook, using fabrication, intimidation and confusion to tinker with the political process.
I don't believe Mettler to be evil. He's a political zealot convinced his political foes are his mortal enemies. Sound familiar?
He believes the local "machine" that he butts heads with politically plays dirty pool and the only way to defeat it is to get down and dirty with it, much like McCarthy warned regarding the fight with communists. Like his Wisconsin hero, Mettler blames political adversaries like the San Diego 21-year-old Mettler fought. He insisted it was self-defense.
In addition, in a radio interview Mettler accepted the mistake of lying about knowing Holloway but again claimed it was in defense of his campaign and he was simply shoeing away a saboteur.
I'm not trying to compare Mettler's recent headlines with those of Joseph McCarthy, but the M and M boys have proven that the end does not justify the means and even when deceit appears to dominate the day, as it did for a few harrowing hours in the 1950s, in the end truth and justice always seem to rear their gorgeous heads.
And there's nothing whacky about that.
Ralph Bailey, who hosts a talk show on AM 1560 KNZR, is one of four conservative community columnists whose work appears here every Saturday. These are the opinions of Bailey, not necessarily The Californian. You can e-mail him at rbailey@bakersfield. com. Next week: Heather Ijames.
