San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
The latest installment of CityBeat's election column, Turds & Blossoms, wherein we rate campaigns and candidates and award them turds or blossoms for their latest foibles and triumphs.
Elfish Interests
A few weeks ago, CityBeat was passing through the Civic Center Plaza, checking out the dwindling Occupy San Diego crowd, when we spied Matt Donnellan, an aide to City Councilmember Lorie Zapf, coordinating some sort of stunt to ridicule the protesters. Donnellan (or “Fabio,” as the Occupiers call him) was directing a group of Republican college students dressed in elf costumes to march and wave anti-labor signs at a video camera.
Those clips ended up as part of a video skit at an “Occupy Christmas” banquet benefitting the Lincoln Club of San Diego County, a conservative, pro-business political organization.
The video, which was leaked this week, is not only spectacularly unfunny, but also nearly incoherent. The old-timey newsreel features the elves marching in solidarity with the “Commercialize Christmas” movement. The Lincoln Club parodies its own diehard advocacy for capitalism in an apparent attempt at self-deprecation. For example, City Councilmember Kevin Faulconer calls for the redistribution of coal lumps. Another Republican City Council member, Carl DeMaio, announces a hunger strike.
“We will not eat even one lobbyist meal, not one morsel,” says DeMaio, the only mayoral candidate to appear in the video.
Lincoln Club honcho T.J. Zane also chimes in: “There’s absolutely no reason the world-wide Santa should not make at least a $5-million-a-year annual bonus, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t turn the season of giving into a year-long season of taking.”
Speaking of taking: The Lincoln Club stole one of CityBeat’s photos of Occupy San Diego for another video presented during the fundraiser, a six-minute reel promoting every political mailer the Lincoln Club has sent since the Baby Abe was born in that rickety Kentucky manger. We hope Santa leaves the Lincoln Club a sack’s worth of reindeer craps for the dumb videos, the copyright infringement and the smug remark the group posted afterward to Facebook and Twitter: “Fantastic event this evening to celebrate prosperity & free enterprise... Sadly, no Occutards crashed it.”
Send T&B nominations to davem@sdcitybeat.com.
