Prevatt Jumps The Shark

Let me preface this post by saying that I believe that Irvine City Councilman Steven Choi’s decision to display a picture depicting Speaker Nancy Pelosi as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was a tad ridiculous and in bad taste.  As an elected representitive of the people of Irvine he should show a certain level of decorum.  With that being said I find the level of outrage being shown by certain folks in the blogosphere to be a bit over the top and in many cases quite disingenuous and very selective.

In particular the pontifications of Chris Prevatt seem to take the cake and it appears that Prevatt chose to “jump the shark” in an attempt to breathe life into the blog that he has driven into the ground.  Prevatt is trying to equate Choi’s foolish actions with the racist and insensitive email sent out by former Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose. 

In a comment posted on the Orange County Register website on December 7th Prevatt wrote, “This is a bad as Dean Grose in Los Alamitos last February”.  He followed that intellectual nugget up with a complete blog post on the Liberal OC entitled “Steven Choi – The Dean Grose of Irvine”.  In the post Prevatt opined that Choi should resign from office.

While I do think that Choi comparing Pelosi to a muderous dictator was quite overreaching and a very poor political analogy I do not believe it even comes close to comparison in relationship to Grose’s overtly racist email.  Prevatt’s attempt to link the two clearly shows a disconnect on his part in regards to the hateful nature of Grose’s email and the pain that it causes the African-American community.

In the lead up to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq I participated in many anti-war protests from San Francisco to Orange County and all points in between.  At every event I attended there were posters and signs depicting Bush, Dick Cheney and others as Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders.  I regret to say that even I routinely referred to them and depicted them as Nazi’s.  I doubt that Prevatt and the others ever chastised anyone for doing this.

Prevatt’s fellow blogger at Blue County, Claudio Gallegos, routinely depicts Allan Mansoor and his allies as Nazi’s and death camp operators.  Is that okay with Chris?  Has he ever uttered a peep about this?  The answer is that Prevatt has selective outrage.  While I find Mansoor’s policies and platform despicable I find Gallegos portrayal of them to be equally reprehensible.  You will never read a word of criticism about Gallegos from Prevatt.

Finally the most disturbing thing I saw from Prevatt was another comment that I read on the OC Register website.  On December 8th he wrote, “Choi picks the Harry S Truman Dinner to protest Pelosi. Choi is Korean. If it wasn’t for Truman, Choi wouldn’t be able to speak at all. He probably wouldn’t even be in this country”.  Do I sense a tinge of anti-immigrant sentiment in that comment, perhaps even some racism?  Perhaps Chris is the Dean Grose of the Orange County blogosphere.

What Choi did was pretty silly and beneath someone who represents the people of Irvine, but the selective outrage from folks like Prevatt is equally silly.  With all the attention they have paid to Choi’s antics they have raised his public stature in the eyes of the right-wing fringe.  He is now the Orange County version of the dimwitted Congressman Joe Wilson that yelled out “you lie” to President Obama.  These guys have done more to help Choi get elected to the State Assembly than Choi could have done for himself.  Good job guys!