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Detroit's 'Operation Sistergirl'
Thursday April 17, 2008
By Ellis Washington
You can take the [sister]girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the [sister]girl.~ Conventional wisdom of inner-city Detroit
One of the intrinsic defects of a representative democracy is that politicians are human, not angels. Paraphrasing an idea of Bishop T.D. Jakes, "We can only catch what we fished out of your pond, and if your pond was a sewer, we got what we got." In other words, the nine representatives of the Detroit City Council – like elected officials all over America, from the president of the U.S. to your local dogcatcher – are merely a microcosm of what America has to offer – the good, the bad, the ugly ... and the ignorant.
For the nominee of the bad, the ugly and the ignorant categories is none other than Detroit City Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, wife of arch-liberal Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has been a member of Congress since 1965.
Last week, the council began it's own investigative hearing into the police whistleblower lawsuit secret settlement agreement between Mayor Kilpatrick, former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, and two former police officers, deputy police chief and head of internal affairs Gary Brown and mayoral bodyguard Harold Nelthorpe – honorable men who were prevented and later fired for investigating a wild sex party the mayor had at his mansion in October 2002.
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Monica Conyers, as president pro tem, is the second-highest ranking member of the Detroit City Council. She is very concerned about council being sued by a Detroit resident because in October 2007 eight out of nine council members signed off on the $9 million dollar whistleblower settlement agreement with virtually no due diligence on their part, a clear dereliction of duty.
The lone dissenting voice against the settlement agreement was Councilwoman Joann Watson who said: "They can sue you [city council]; I voted no." Watson has repeatedly let it be known that she alone voted against the settlement agreement to the growing dismay of Conyers.
As the hearings ensued, Conyers demanded Watson stop interrupting and disrespecting her. She added: "We all know how you voted; you don't have to keep repeating it."
Finally, in a fit of rage that shocked all of her council colleagues, as well as the packed assembly hall audience, Conyers vented her fury not on Watson, but on her superior, the man to her immediate left, Detroit City Council President Ken Cockrel Jr.
Despite a blistering Sistergirl diatribe that included a vicious series of ad hominem attacks against Cockrel's manhood, ironically it was Conyers that demanded respect as Cockrel tried in vain to conduct the hearing. "You're not my daddy!" "You do that at home, not here. Give me some respect 'cause I'm tired of that. You may not do that at home, but you do it in here," Conyers ranted.
"Grow up!" she continued. "Control your house and you'll know how to treat women better." Cockrel reacted by saying that Conyers had no credibility to talk about the matter of respect while interrupting others.
When Cockrel later threatened to adjourn the meeting, Conyers was defiant: "Do it, baby. Do it. Do it!" Later Conyers three times called Cockrel, a big man with a distinctively large cranium, "Shrek," a popular lovable green ogre from the movie series of the same name. As the two council members bantered back and forth, angry shouts from the audience erupted: "You're disrespecting the citizens!" and "This is a shame!"
Regrettably, the city of Detroit is a perfect paradigm of the incompetence that is inevitable when you allow one political ideology (Democrat/liberalism) to dominate city government with no checks and balances by an opposing political viewpoint (Republican/conservatism).
For example, six years after the mayor's orgy at the Manoogian Mansion, not one Detroiter has filed a petition to force Mayor Kilpatrick to resign. Likewise I predict that not one Detroiter will file a petition to remove Monica Conyers from office, a woman obviously bereft of reason, decorum, judgment and the ability to perform effectively her duties as president pro tem of a major American city.
The closest Detroit came to an ideological balance in modern times was during the 1950s when Mayor Albert E. Cobo (1950-57), a Jew and a Republican with great political skills and leadership abilities, competently governed the city. This was the zenith of Detroit's greatness when its population soared to 2 million. The American Dream is what drew tens of millions of black people to migrate from the South, including my mother and aunt, mere teenagers from Arkansas, to the big city "up north." Mayor Cobo was later honored by the city in naming our largest arena after him – Cobo Hall, in downtown Detroit.
The quote above by Bishop T.D. Jakes applies to Detroit: "We can only catch what we fished out of your pond, and if your pond was a sewer, we got what we got." Detroiters have no one to blame but themselves and the racialist politics blacks have practiced since seizing majority power in big cities across America these past 40 years.
It was that venerated liberal Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who a few years after leaving the bench to conservative jurist Justice Clarence Thomas was asked what he thought of his black successor and quipped: "A black snake will bite you just as fast as a white snake will." True, true. But let's apply that same logic of Justice Marshall to 40 years of so-called black leadership in Congress, in the Senate, on public school boards, as classroom teachers, in big cities, in medium-sized cities and even in small towns across America.
Pick a state, pick a city and I bet you that nine times out of 10 the black leadership over city governmental affairs in majority black cities and towns has been abysmal. Its ironic that black racialist politics irrationally do the same thing blacks have criticized whites for doing in America for centuries – electing people not based on the content of their character, but by the color of their skin. It's liberalism. It's racism. It's madness, and it must end if America is to survive as a representative republic governed by a Constitution founded upon transcendent and heroic principles – "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Yes, Sistergirl Monica Conyers showed out Friday in Detroit. However, I believe that this was a planned coup d'etat, that behind the scenes through her powerful and influential husband and his colleague, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick (who is my representative and the mother of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick), deployed what I identify as "Operation Sistergirl."
Welcome to Alice in Michiganland where up is down, 911 calls go into voice mail, criminals running wild, psychopaths and nitwits run city government, a 75 percent high school dropout rate is tolerated, where conservatives like me with real solutions to big-city problems are ignored.
Welcome to Detroit, where a city held hostage by a Stalinist, group-think mentality stuck on stupid gets you elected mayor (twice), or in Monica Conyers' case, elected council president pro tem, the second highest member of the Detroit City Council, who repeatedly refers to her superior as "Shrek."
Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality:
The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil:
Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).
Washington's latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust," can be pre-ordered by calling 800-462-6420, promotion code "UPREPUB."
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