Local Smear Campaign

When I heard about the website devoted to smearing Lathrop's mayor Kristy Sayles, being interested in all things political, I immediately had to take a look. My first reaction was, "this is why people don't run for public office." (And thank you Manteca Bulletin for giving the deplorable piece-of-crap website publicity it doesn't deserve.) I don't live in Lathrop but I follow what goes on there since it's so close by and we have friends that live there.

Regardless of how I feel personally about Lathrop's mayor, I gotta say that I was pretty much horrified by what I read on the "anonymous" website. It's basically a litany of her personal life and the goings on there, past and present, and has little or nothing to do with how she's performed as mayor or why she should be voted out of office.

The Bulletin calls the website "slick" and that it is. It's also one of the meanest smear campaigns I've seen and the "webmaster" seems to personally take great delight in airing Sayles' dirty laundry and responding to comments, maybe a little too much delight. It borders on the obsessive. I also have a pretty good idea who might be behind it and I'm sure a lot of other people have a good idea too. Do I need to say that it's someone who's also running for public office in Lathrop?

When I first looked at the "anonymous" website there was something very familiar about it but I couldn't figure out what it was until today when Joe told me to take a look at one of his older posts on our blog here. The anonymous website owner/owners stole the photo they used for their website's logo from MantecaLive.com. We were not asked permission by anyone to use the photo which was taken by my blog partner. Not only is this a theft of our intellectual property, but it taints us and our blog by associating us with what may be a libelous website trying to destroy the reputation of a city official.

There's something fishy in Lathrop and it stinks to high heaven (I know, it's a terrible cliché but it fits). It's pretty obvious that Kristy Sayles has attracted some enemies during her tenure as mayor. What is not obvious is exactly what she's done to garner such wrath. We've heard she "took money from developers" but so what? Almost every single person in an elected position in Manteca and Lathrop has taken money from developers. How many of them have been investigated by a grand jury?

When's the last time you heard of a city council rejecting the findings of a grand jury about their own mayor? That's one of the issues on the website dedicated to her political demise. If a grand jury can find no evidence of wrong-doing, then who can? Shall we try our politicians in the media (and I'm including websites and blogs in that definition) by repeating half-truths and innuendo and stating it as fact and hide behind the veil of anonymity the internet offers? Do we want to elect people to represent us who engage in such tactics? I don't think we do.

I think the people of Lathrop deserve to know who's behind the "anonymous" website dedicated solely to ruining the reputation and career of a publicly elected official. Whether you like the mayor or not, this is truly politics at its dirtiest. If I lived in Lathrop, I'd want to know who was behind it because I think it says far more about their character than it does about anything else.

I call upon all the candidates on the ballot for Lathrop public office to publicly denounce the anonymous website and disassociate themselves with it. Maybe by process of elimination, the truth will come out.