By now you’ve seen the story in today’s paper about that surreptitious recording that a low-rent landlord made last year during a meeting with Mayor Mike Rawlings. There’s something I can’t shake about this deal. When the Observer (aka “a news website”) published the recording, the mayor said he felt “kind of sleazy” about the recording. If you were just doing your job as mayor, looking out for the citizens of Dallas who live in low-rent houses, if you weren’t trying to jawbone the owner of those houses into selling his property at depressed prices to make way for developers, renters be damned — if that’s what was happening in that meeting, and if you then learned the meeting had been secretly recorded, wouldn’t you say, “I feel cheated”? Or wouldn’t you say, “I feel like I was taken advantage of”? Or wouldn’t you say, “I feel angry”? Or wouldn’t you say, “I feel kind of violated”?
You feel sleazy when you’ve done something dirty that you regret. One last question, then: why does the mayor feel sleazy?
