When it comes to words, a chamber pot is as good as a Ming vase to a blind councilman.

NA Confidential is amused to learn that 4th District Councilman Larry Kochert is annoyed with us for using the word “urinate” to describe the way that CM Kochert and his fellow obstructionists on the city council’s Gang of Four peevishly dismissed the concept of ordinance enforcement at Monday’s seminal council meeting.

Supposedly, CM Kochert is so mightily annoyed that he described the author of NA Confidential as “illiterate.”

Impressive as such a disjointed rejoinder undoubtedly is to the likes of Councilman Cappuccino, the doomsayers of the Brambleberry faction, and the anonymously courageous “tiny tots” at the Trog Blog, it remains an undisputed fact that at Monday night’s meeting, CMs Kochert, Steve Price, Dan Coffey and Bill Schmidt first chose to incite an already disgruntled crowd with a choreographed display of demagoguery unparalleled even by their own lofty standards of inanity, and then, when given the immediate opportunity to seek the answers to these and many other questions by simply asking them of Mayor James Garner, who stood before them and was willing and able to indulge their every self-serving, exploratory whim, instead sat staring blankly at their illegible scratch pad doodles, preferring to wait, as though conspiring behind the playground monkey bars, for the Mayor to depart the room before lashing out at him by publicly humiliating their colleague, Jack Messer, and by doing so, showing their utter contempt for the very concept of effective ordinance enforcement.

Shrug.

Readers, you be the judge. If such obviously politicized behavior is not anti-social, not hypocritical, and not tantamount to “urinating” on the concerns of taxpaying citizens in this city, then exactly what is?

Speaking personally, as soon as I read something – anything, up to and including a “luv ya honey” post-it-note, grocery list or complaint about bad service at the Cracker Barrel – that CM Kochert has written during his long tenure on the council, during which time he wishes us to believe that absolutely nothing bad occurring within the city limits of New Albany has been in any way attributable to him, then it will finally be possible to fairly judge the accuracy of his accusation of illiteracy.

Until then, if it walks like a superannuated politico, and talks like a ward-heeling councilman concerned above all else with re-election… well, you know the rest of the equation.

Consider this a challenge to any of the aforementioned "public" servants to answer one or more of the following essay questions, in writing, for publication (sans editorial alteration or comment in their original format) in NA Confidential.

1. Explain how summarily rejecting the best-qualified candidate for ordinance enforcement serves the future interests of the city of New Albany.

2. Explain how the manner by which you did so is something that can be associated with adult behavior, as opposed to juvenile snickering, bickering and nose picking.

3. Explain why, apart from your deceptive public pronouncements to the contrary, that you feel threatened by effective ordinance enforcement, in that an emerging culture of accountability will take away from your vote totals, and why you shouldn’t be castigated for permitting such self-serving interests to interfere with cleaning up the city.

4. Explain why it is that councilmen who have served for so many years still somehow don’t know where to find the information they incessantly and whiningly insist is being denied them.

5. Explain what motives are served by an ongoing, institutionalized petulance on the topic of county participation in the Scribner Place project, other than to offend the very people you seek to influence, and to substitute the cheap thrill of a self-fulfilling prophecy for the verifiable gains to the community of tangible success.

That’s enough for now; I have a bike ride to commence.

Councilmen, pick up your crayons, compose those paragraphs, and tell us how you’re part of the solution. Until you do, we're simply not buying any of it.

Note that I chose not to use the word “defecation” in this context out of deference to the sensibilities of younger readers.