Truth is stranger than fact: CM dramatically refuses dictation, opts for self-arousal as the preferred means of upgrading city attorney position.

Earlier at NA Confidential, the question was asked:

Uh ... do I have this right?

Here’s part of the answer in the form of the Tribune’s account of Thursday evening’s fractious city council meeting:

Attorney job passes first vote; Neighborhood groups rebuffed in request for tabling, by Eric Scott Campbell (News-Tribune).

Tribune reporter Campbell describes the Wizard of Westside’s crowning outburst:

(Greg) Roberts approached the podium and repeated the appeal for time to research. When (CM Mark) Seabrook asked Roberts why he thought the bill wasn’t being tabled, Roberts indicated the bill was not a product of the forums.

(CM Dan) Coffey shouted, “I’m not dictated to by a neighborhood forum!”

Previously, having hijacked the full-time city attorney idea for his own nefarious and purely political purposes by means of a nifty stratagem that he obviously considered worthy of television’s famed “Matlock,” CM Coffey piously cited the jilting of his impoverished fiefdom as a prime motive for his pique:

This request appeared to have bothered Coffey when it was time to take action on the bill. He did not table it, and he chastised forum organizers, saying they did not invite his West End’s neighborhood association.“We compromise the biggest neighborhood association there is,” Coffey said.

This breathtaking revelation comes as great news to the many neighborhood forum organizers, who recently have had more luck finding the gunman on the grassy knoll than they have locating any evidence of a West End neighborhood association that exists apart from a slip of yellowed paper in CM Coffey’s wallet – or a figment in his cobwebbed imagination.

But in a moment of uncharacteristic candor, CM Cappuccino acknowledged something that was painfully obvious to all in attendance:

About the request to table, Coffey said, “I’ve seen politics in this tonight.”

Boy, has he – and he should know better than anyone, because the politics he cites are all of his own making, but as we’ve noted here for quite some time, when it comes to CM Coffey, it’s rarely if ever about the greater good of New Albany.

Rather, what good there is to be found within a Coffeyite proclamation must be defined somewhat more narrowly, and on occasion, it’s so scarce as to entirely elude detection.

If there is a West End neighborhood group, a rude awakening is in order: Yet again, you’re being marched like lemmings to the precipice … and guess who’ll be standing aside, watching with paternalistic pride, as you hit the rocks?

I attended the first neighborhood forum and observed the wonderful discussion, one masterfully moderated by Dr. Newman, which concluded with those present expressing unanimity in researching the city attorney position and the possibilities inherent with expanding it.

I’m told that this research is ongoing. A second forum has occurred and another is planned, and forum participants are in the process of scheduling a meeting with Mayor James Garner and the current city attorney, Shane Gibson, to discuss the issue.

A promising whiff of civility, cooperation and – gasp – democracy was in the air, and apparently such a flowering, however modest, even naïve, posed a mortal threat to the pompous ego of New Albany’s foremost ward-heeling schoolyard bully, who has determined to forcibly seize the city attorney issue from the citizenry, to gut it, to deprive it of any meaningful context whatsoever, then to merrily wave the flattened and bloodied carcass for political gain during the next electoral cycle.

Quite simply, there can be no other explanation than this for the Wizard of Westside’s latest act of brazen and self-serving chicanery.

Should we refuse to join Dan Coffey’s perpetually abused constituents in drinking the loutish councilman’s favored brand of Kool-Aid? After all, to do so might well endanger good-faith efforts already expended toward steps to enhance ordinance enforcement.

Even if the diligent research currently being pursued provides clear evidence that an expanded city attorney position is the correct first step in the direction of easing the symptoms of the New Albany Syndrome (and as readers already know, not all see it as such), has the reality of CM Coffey’s savage co-opting of the measure tainted it beyond redemption?

Would it be subject to the councilman’s further politically motivated manipulations? We all know they're coming.

In short, has CM Coffey’s cynical embrace of a position that is contradicted by his every breath rendered it DOA?

I don’t pretend to know the answer to these conundrums, and I want to see the gist of the findings and consider the opinions of the researchers. Compromise should never be ruled out.

But one thing is clear: It would be a mistake, pure and simple, to fall for the councilman’s transparent ploy. There's no sincerity therein -- only conniving.

We must be very, very careful.