Bob Filner’s sexual-harassment training excuse doesn’t add up
SAN DIEGO – The City Council and Mayor Headlock are wrestling over who should pay to defend the mayor’s bad behavior in court.
It’s crystal clear that the city’s failure to provide the mayor with compulsory sexual harassment training resulted in his inability to prevent himself from putting his director of communications in a headlock and telling her she’d perform better without panties.
As the mayor’s attorney Harvey Berger put it so logically in a letter to San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith the other day: “Had the city provided mandatory sexual harassment training to Mayor Filner, Ms. McCormack Jackson may never have brought her lawsuit.”
So true.
All over San Diego, people are shaking their heads at the city’s epic failure. Obviously, this whole mess is the fault of the city, so it’s only fair that taxpayers should pony up.
How was a 70-year-old career politician who began serving in Congress in 1993 supposed to know that coming on to women, touching them, grabbing them, and forcibly kissing them was wrong? That such behavior could end or cast an irreducible shadow over even the most stellar political career?
No one told him! It’s not his fault!
Was he supposed to be paying attention in 1995 when Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood left the Senate in disgrace after 19 women claimed he made unwanted sexual advances?
Maybe he was taking a nap in the cloakroom in 1999 during the impeachment of President Clinton, spurred by the president’s compulsive sexual misbehavior.
He probably just didn’t connect the pixilated dots between U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s failure to keep his, um, phone in his pants, and Weiner’s resignation from Congress in 2011.
Was Filner supposed to take his own online sexual harassment training, as the previous San Diego mayor had done?
Filner can’t pay attention to every little thing.
He’s busy.
You know: So many women, so little time …
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Twitter: @robinabcarian
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