That Tacy will quite likely have to resign over his false accusations aimed at opposition Mayor Ed Martin and Councilwoman Sue Lang may not have yet dawned on the newly lamed duck. His head has quite likely not yet cleared from the week's dizzying events.

Not entirely Tacy's fault -- for most of it, you can thank the Herald-Trib and film noir journalism
Still, you can't blame Tacy for the initial mess. After all, an entire local news bureau, owned and operated by the normally prestigious New York Times, decided that fact checking and research are optional components of investigative journalism. The newspaper's ace reporter Kim Hackett, backed by multi-million dollar printing presses and fueled by the quite correct perception that something isn't quite right at city hall, took action. She slipped into the black-and-white world of 1940s Ben Hecht cinema journalism and grabbed onto the first thing that moved, slammed it into a chair, and started yelling "Names, dammit, we want names!"

I have to envy her. It's something that I've always wanted to do to city hall: backed by the awesome power of a multi-million dollar news organization complete with its own legal team, just force the bastards' doors wide open and actually make them give real answers for a change.

When the Herald-Trib finished pistol-whipping Martin, they turned the glaring light on him. Martin, truly politically naive to the rules of the bloodsport that is Venice insider politics, was almost ready to sign the confession, any confession (see Martin's letter to Herald-Trib's Mike Connelly, sidebar at right), when Tacy, overcome with evil glee and the spirit of Peter Lorre, actually saved the day by staggering into the camera frame and drunkenly accused the mayor of plotting to assassinate the governor or some such foul and fantastic crime.

It was a true film-noir moment as reporters suddenly forgot about Martin. Like Labradors chasing a squirrel, they all started running after Tacy for the next juicy quote, which turned out to be something remarkably similar to 'I don't know what the f**k I am talking about.'

The only thing missing from this sad comedy was a convicted killer hiding in a roll-top desk.

You are what you write
What was really funny about the Herald-Trib's approach to investigative journalism was that they emulated the very behavior that they were decrying at city hall. The airport process is all out of whack, you guys at city hall aren't doing things in the right order. After a short period of impressive stomping around like young Geraldo Rivera when he investigated New York City's mental hospitals, they unleashed their investigative blast onto pulp morning newsprint and the web. And then, and here's the odd part, and then their ace reporter finally started in with a volume of public record requests from the Mayor to support the theory that spawned the error-filled story published on April 29. That stream of emails went to Hackett on May 2, three days after the initial publication of her high-flying exposé of airport planning shenanigans.

One more time for the slow kids: The key documents that would support or debunk the newspaper's story were requested by the newspaper after the story was published. After the story was published. The published story was about how city hall's procedures were screwed up because events in city hall's procedures were out of sequence.

The airport is the problem, but not in the way everyone thinks
I've never really come to the full understanding of why, and I don't want to because I like staying alive, but I am convinced that the airport itself was at the root of the protection of the fiends and thugs in true power in Venice. Whatever covert ops are being run at the airport at any given time (and it doesn't take Dan Hopsicker to tell you that there's been a lot of them over the years), the protection of secrecy of what was going on at the airport was far more important to the state and federal powers that be, lawful and otherwise, than checking out some petty small-town embezzlements. As long as Venice can keep a low profile and stay out of the news, as long as the airport can be an invisible tool of invisible powers high above us, the rest of the town can re-enact Lord of the Flies as many times as it likes without investigative interference.

Terrorists did learn how to fly here. Ollie North did run a lot of Iran/Contra crap through here. Military transports still stop here routinely in the middle of the night. Fisherman have been telling me lately of low-flying no-lights military choppers flying in and out under cover of darkness. Weird shit just always seems to happen there.

I can't prove it, but after years of writing about and investigating petty crimes and misdemeanors and major scams at the highest levels of a low-end backwater government, I've firmly come to believe that it is true.

Hopsicker's theory, that the training of the 9/11 terrorists at the Venice airport was a CIA covert surveillance op that went horribly wrong, is incredibly believable with just the few facts that he put together and badly wrote about.

After witnessing firsthand all of the bizarre federal investigations into the city's underhanded dealings over the years (many of them documented elsewhere on this web site), investigations that have been initiated and then dropped with no resolution, as though someone higher up the food chain had pulled the carrot back up into the sky, it's only normal to form such an insane paranoid theory.

This is the healing?
So where do we go from here? I dunno, but the scars from this past week are way too deep to heal. The political fallout from this nuclear war of the poses is some heavily irradiated and seriously lethal dust.

I know Marty Black is disgusted. His hands are bloody as hell anyway, so he has only himself to blame for his latest wave of nausea. He's talked numerous times with numerous people recently that maybe it's time to move on. Well, with that attitude, maybe it is. Black's quote in the May 6 edition of the Herald-Tribune is a prime example of his ongoing jockeying for power with council:

"They [city council] really shouldn't create even the impression of a conflict," Black said. "That's been a consistent message from our office."

The view from out here in the cheap seats of council chambers over the past few months has not been pretty. Black has on more than a few occasions given the appearance that he is sabotaging the will of council and vice versa. For Black, it has been frustrating to deal with a council that does not share his vision of the future of Venice or even how a city government should be run. From Martin's position, it appears that Black would rather have his [former mayor] Fred Hammett hand puppet back. Black's icepick-in-the-eye memos, notably his explanation to the media of his involvement in the current airport plan media debacle, have undercut the mayor and council's effectiveness by leaving the impression with print media that Black is the man with the plan for the city and that council is floundering because they refuse to knuckle under to his authority. Strangely, print media has yet to ask the question: who is supposed to be in charge here?

As for Tacy? If he doesn't resign, he's one ethics complaint away from losing his lifetime health insurance benefits, courtesy of being on council for six years. He's in a no-win -- either way he's wrong. If Martin and Lang were actually breaking the law, he had a duty to report it, not to the Herald-Trib in a whiskey-stained email, but to the proper authorities. If he didn't witness enough to prove that they were breaking the law, he had no business making a wrongful accusation purely for political one upsmanship.

Tacy is screwed either way that wind blows.

Then again, if the Herald-Tribune allows their reporters to pull another dumb stunt like this past week's events, so are we all.