America’s Most Wanted – with a slice o' Coffey Cake on the side.

Do we deserve any of this?

You know, as punishment for some variety of karma wastage?

New Albany councilwoman says ‘I’m innocent’; Diane McCartin-Benedetti arrested for DUI, by Matt Thacker (News and Tribune).

New Albany City Councilwoman Diane McCartin-Benedetti didn’t have much to say Monday following her weekend arrest for operating while intoxicated by refusal. However, she said her story will be told at a later date.

“I’m innocent and the facts will be forthcoming,” McCartin-Benedetti told The Tribune.

Score at least one point for the council woman. Lest we've forgotten, Americans are presumed innocent until proven guilty, or at least that's the assumption. She’s not a black male, and that bodes well for her in purely statistical terms (kindly note that I abhor profiling in any form).

Not unexpectedly, the main local news sources are choosing to entertain us even further by enlisting Dan Coffey in the cause of subjective analysis, enabling him to fulfill the only political mandate that he really knows: Interjecting his own agenda into places where it seldom belongs.

So it is that the same etiquette-challenged council president who earlier this year mistook Studio’s for a costume party and impersonated a copperhead snake, later threatening bodily harm to an educated citizen, now helpfully notes that there is a reason why his fellow council time servers didn’t admonish him at the time.

… Coffey said he does not condone McCartin-Benedetti’s action, but he does not expect the council will take any action against her because it has no policing authority.

Indeed it doesn’t, although ethical authority might be a different and reachable goal, but as with his own transgression and the manner by which it was swept under a rug of indifference, Coffey sees to it that there’ll be no concepts like that on his watch.

Remarkably, it gets even worse. Apparently it’s Halloween every day on West 7th, as Coffey makes the reporter wait on the porch while he ducks into a nearby water closet, dons the plush vestments, approaches the stand with a plastic cup of Welch’s and a plate of stale Ritz crackers, and straddles a standard of piety that congenitally escapes his own political realm.

“I hate to see anybody in a difficult situation, but the bottom line is we all make mistakes,” Coffey said. “Sometimes it actually ends up making us a better person.”

Verily, that’s a straight line for the ages. Where’s Milton Berle when you need him most? However, there’s even more mirth to come:

Coffey said McCartin-Benedetti’s arrest underscores a growing problem in New Albany.

“If you look at all the development downtown, it’s all been alcohol establishments,” Coffey said. “Downtown is just saturated with them.”

That’s one breathtaking grandstand.

We know from the start that Coffey's as perpetual a political non-entity as we’re likely to witness in our lifetimes, but just for the fun of it, we'll take him at his caterwauling word and concede that yes, it’s true: There are a few places downtown that sell alcoholic beverages.

Of course, this plain fact has nothing whatsoever to do with Benedetti’s consumption (if any) and arrest. There are places to drink in the suburbs, too, and also package stores. One might run a basement distilling operation and pour the yield into a flask.

Then again, we already knew that rarely does a nonsensical Coffey utterance correspond with reality outside of his pre-determined spin-cycle needs, and in his present zeal to co-opt Benedetti’s misfortune for his own personal and political self-aggrandizement, Coffey is able to play a double game, holding out an olive branch of sorts to lure the council woman into his obstructionist hovel, and blaming downtown revitalization (“them people”) for the first of what we can expect will become a long list of evils and travails.

Amid the exaggerated nothingness of Coffey’s stunted game playing, it’s worth recalling that the downtown food and beverage establishments slated for ritualistic attack by the Coffey cabal were made possible by the state's special riverfront development area rules for three-way licenses, and in turn, these rules could not be implemented without an affirmative vote by the city council.

That's right: New Albany’s city council duly approved the riverfront development area and the regulatory regime leading to the “saturation” against which Coffey froths – not yesterday, but in 2006 – and by a unanimous vote. Even Steve Price was for it, at least after being assured that the video poker machines at the VFW remained safe and sound.

Yes, and this means that three years ago, Coffey voted in favor of what he now finds expedient to decry, surely dismissing the inherent hypocrisy as a standard that doesn’t apply to him. Exactly how does Coffey explain his previous vote?

We’re left to guess that as is customary with him, he didn't have the right information at the time – and has been busy fabricating freshly spurious “facts” ever since by means of the sausage grinder he keeps for just such cases.

As always, it’s a purely depressing spectacle.

Has Skittles the Cat registered for a primary run against the Wizard next time?