Welcome To Utah. Now Go Home.

I am completely and utterly embarrassed by the behavior of Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.

For the non-Utahns among us, President Bush visited Salt Lake City to speak to the VFW convention. Naturally, there was a protest organized. The problem with this protest is that it was (in part) organized by Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. He used his official city e-mail address and his official, supposedly non-partisan city title. He may actually have violated the law by doing so.

The Daily Herald had an op-ed yesterday that I think completely sums up my views on the subject. 25 words or less: we work hard to get conventions here, and Mayor Anderson steps out of his league to shoot us in the foot. I heard Mayor Anderson on the radio. His message was basically, "Welcome to Utah, VFW convention! Now go home, you stupid warmongering baby-eaters."

To that I would add that I have never at any time before yesterday been for or against Mayor Anderson. He was fairly elected mayor of Salt Lake City by Salt Lake City residents and although his liberal leanings were always clear, I had no opinion of him whatsoever. (Unlike some conservatives, I don't hate liberals on principle; I'm half Democrat on my mother's side.) But then I heard Mayor Anderson interviewed yesterday morning by KSL radio host Doug Wright. Wright was courteous to him, although it was clear they disagreed tremendously on a lot of political issues. And Mayor Anderson gave the definitive demonstration of Mark Twain's First Law of Fools* by opening his mouth and removing all doubt. This guy, I can safely say, has drunk the Kool-Aid. All of it. The whole half-gallon of Kickin' Kiwi Strawberry. I swear to God the guy recited every single liberal slogan known to man, except for "Free Mumia." If you don't believe me, click the link above and hear him for yourself.

Now, I am not embarrassed that the mayor of Salt Lake City is a liberal moonbat. They can elect whomever they want, it's their city and (thank God) I don't have to live in it. But he is the Mayor of Salt Lake City. He is not, as John Petroff Jr. so aptly put it, the Mayor of Utah. He does not get to represent, as he seems to think he does, the residents of the state of Utah at large. And that is why myself and other Utah bloggers are voicing their opposition to his uncouth behavior and pointing out that it is unbecoming to his office. Unfortunately, as our experience with the Legacy Highway points out, this is vintage Rocky.

As is traditional with protests, the estimate of how many people actually attended varies by approximately one order of magnitude from low to high estimates and depends on who's doing the estimating. Official media estimates seem to be in the 1000 to 2000 range, Captain Holly's boots-on-the-ground estimate (with pics!) is 300, Ken of Oblogatory Anecdotes estimates 500, and moonbat estimates go as high as 3000 (give them a week, and they'll be up to 30,000 and in a month will exceed the population of Utah). It is known that some of the people there were protesting the protesters, so I have to wonder how many of those were actually there to protest with Mayor Anderson.

So on behalf of sensible Utahns everywhere, I apologize for the behavior of the crazy Mayor Of Utah Salt Lake City and urge everyone, now that this post has been read and I've gotten it out of my system, to utterly ignore him. He claims to represent a whole huge faction of Utahns, but in the end he represents a very tiny minority of them. Even taking the high end estimates, 3000 out of 2.4 million is pretty dang small.



* Mark Twain once said (and I paraphrase), "It is better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."