From Keith Taylor, San Diego:
I remember the program was interrupted by one of those ‘breaking news” things: //itals// There is the mayor of Imperial Beach trying to save the city’s pier. //end itals// Sure enough, far out on Imperial Beach pier a lone figure using a bucket and a rope, was fighting a fire all by himself. The San Diego fire department had told him they didn’t have a fireboat available.
The mayor would haul a bucket of water up about 20 feet of freeboard and fling it on the blazing shed atop the pier. It was of little avail, unless you count the intangible effect of publicity. Brian Bilbray attracted all sorts of that. He had paddled his surfboard out past the fire then somehow shinnied up the barnacle encrusted pilings to the pier.
On a slow news day a TV crew found just the story to hype the 11 o’clock news. And the young mayor got the publicity he wanted. The big city to the north found they did have a fireboat available after all. Soon one was squirting a lot more water on the fire than one lonely surfer dude could pull out of the ocean a bucketful at a time. The pier was damaged, but not lost. Imperial Beach, the orphan of the county, got some favorable publicity for a change, and its mayor got nationwide publicity.
That may have been the high point of Bilbray’s political career, but it wasn’t the end of it. Soon he smelled the sweet smell of money. He was a self-proclaimed environmentalist, but, he tried to destroy the Tijuana Estuary and replace that coastal home of wildlife with a yacht marina, and why not? Yacht owners had a lot more money than endangered fish and birds. The Surfriders Foundation got all over him for that.
His fame eventually carried him into congress representing the 49th district. In Washington there was more money to be had.
One of those supplying that moola was Metabolife. The Congressman dutifully wrote letters lauding the company that manufactured a product tied to the deaths of 150 people. The FDA, apparently unimpressed with Brian’s letters, banned the stuff. Still the surfer dude held on for six years. Then Susan Davis upended him.
But like an eccentric football, Bilbray bounced back. The guy who, as a County Supervisor, had the temerity to attempt to build a garbage plant in the middle of the 50th district ended up representing that district. The answer for that anomaly is simple. He’s a Republican in a district that was engineered to be a safe district for Republicans.
But they should not have engineered out common sense! Being represented by an honest person ought to trump party loyalty. It goes with that patriotism we heard so much and saw so little of that from the prior representative.
I hope someone paid attention to the Bill Moyer’s special a couple weeks ago when he exposed the horrible shenanigans of Jack Abramoff. In a scandal that was almost completely not bipartisan, Abramoff bought off one Republican congress person after another. One particular escapade was a junket to the Mariana Islands.
This junket’s purpose was far from fighting to help poor people in Bilbray’s district. Oh no! This was an effort to screw the poorest of the poor. But these were people from another country, so that made it easy to ignore. Abramoff intended to block a reform bill which would have given basic human rights to laborers in one of our protectorates. Large clothing manufacturers were recruiting workers from Asian countries, principally China.
There, like Africans of another century who sold their brothers into slavery, natives would entice women to “come to the United States.” In this case “United States” meant Guam or Saipan where the workers, mostly women, were give the status of indentured servant. This is something all civilized countries outlawed years ago, at least all but one.
Billbray was not only a lobbyist after he left congress, he was in bed with one of the worst of all time. Voters of the 50th district would do well to emulate those in the 49th when they replaced him with Susan Davis in 2000.
I’d think, Republican or no, voters up there should try to erase the memory of Duke Cunningham, and they can’t do it with Brian Bilbray.
//Keith Taylor is a retired Navy officer who lives in Chula Vista. He can be reached at KRTaylorxyz@aol.com
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