Kringeworthy! See Lucille Kring Tell EIGHT More-Than-Half-Lies in 85 Seconds!

By
Greg Diamond
– November 13, 2013Posted in: "The OC", anaheim, Fresh Juice, Lucille Kring
Kring mostly lying

The Councilwoman speaks with a forked tongue on Sept. 3.  Eight half (or less) truths in 85 seconds!  Impressive!

Lucille Kring announces her campaign for Mayor today.  Let’s celebrate by listening to an album of her “greatest hits”!  In the video below, you will literally see her tell EIGHT less than half-truths within 85 seconds.  In its way, it’s impressive!

On Sept. 3, 2013, at the post-Labor Day Anaheim City Council meeting when the Angels contract renegotiation burst once more into public attention, gadfly/provocateur/insult comic William Fitzgerald strode to the podium and called City Councilmember Lucille Kring a “snake in the grass” several times and, once towards the end, “a whore.”  (Fitzgerald contends that his statement was not inappropriate because he used the term in its figurative sense.  But he was about to be outclassed by Kring as a parser of truth!)

I recall this moment vividly because it made many of us wince (and induced Brian Chuchua to step forward immediately and defend Kring’s virtue as, among other things, a literal non-prostitute.)  But what I recently came upon in the course of doing some research is probably much more important: Kring’s response, which comes just after the 25 minute mark in this video.

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Kring, by the way, responds to Fitzgerald immediately after his speech using a commonplace parliamentary motion called a”Point of Personal Privilege” — which Councilmembers can use at any time that they think things have become personally insulting towards themselves or others (with the probable exception of during a public comment itself) to object to another person’s actions and set the record straight.  Given the provocation, Mayor Tait duly allowed her to speak “out of turn,” following Fitzgerald’s rant.  (This once again points out just how atrocious were the cynical claims that the Mayor was somehow personally responsible for Fitzgerald’s attacks on Brandman on Sept. 30.  Any member of the Council could have been recognized immediately to defend both Brandman’s integrity and that of Jews and gays generally — neither of which it is clear Brandman is.)

But back to the topic at hand.  Here’s a transcript of Kring’s remarks (starting at 0:25:16, after she invites Fitzgerald to stick around for her rejoinder and then mocks him for strolling off) with embedded numbers in red for reasons that will become clear:

First of all, [1] last year Disneyland and the Chamber of Commerce absolutely did not endorse me.  You can go back into the records, you can go back into the literature — [2] they did not support me.  And if you look back at [3] my campaign literature, not one of those issues was ever there.

[4] I did say that I would not support the $158 giveaway last year if I had been on this Council, and I told the developers “I would not support that if you bring that back to me.”  [5] They did not bring that program back.  [6] They brought something that was good for the City, good for the people who needed jobs in the City.

Also, [7] I never said in any of my literature that I would support a Citizens’ Oversight Committee.  [8] The Police already have four levels of oversight.  The Police do not want it; [9] the majority of the Citizens do not want a Citizens’ Oversight Committee.

Additionally, [10] when I said that I supported districts, I voted to put districts on the ballot next June.  [11] I also supporting increasing the City Council from five to seven to be put on the ballot next June.

So, Mr. Fitzgerald, I am terribly sorry that facts get in the way of your [12] reading Voice of OC, that only deems to persecute me for political reasons.

Now let’s assign truth values to each statement!

[1] Disney and Anaheim CoC did not endorse Kring:  Literally true, but quite misleading.  We’ll call this only a 20% lie.

[2] Disney and Anaheim CoC did not support Kring:  Highly misleading.  In fact, it’s a fair bet that without the intervention in the City Council race by Disney’s front group “SOAR” (for “Support Our Anaheim Resorts) and the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce [ACOC], Kring would not be sitting on the City Council.

The favored candidates of SOAR/Disney and ACOC were Jordan Brandman and Steven Albert Chavez Lodge (who I last saw at City Hall speaking at a “Keep the Angels” rally.)  Brandman also had the support of the Building Trades and actively spread the word in the relatively Democratic Anaheim flatlands that he was a Democrat.  Brandman also benefited for a time from a “cease fire” agreement between his supporters and the Orange County Employees Association (“OCEA”), wherein the latter would not attack Brandman and the former would not attack the OCEA’s favored candidate, John Leos.  SOAR/Disney and ACOC were pretty much neutral about the campaign of former Councilmember Lucille Kring, who had the support of Mayor Tom Tait and others who thought that a vote for Chuchua or Duane Roberts would be wasted.  (Our Vern Nelson was among those who reluctantly supported Kring.)

Lodge (or Chavez, whatever) had his problems leading up to the election.  The cease-fire faltered, clearing the way (as if it had not been clear before) for vicious and sustained attacks on Leos.  SOAR and ACOC might have been able to salvage Lodge’s candidacy had they decided to come out with truckloads of mailers attacking both Leos and Kring — but they hated Leos much more than they liked Lodge.  So they attacked only Leos, apparently believing — correctly — that they could win over Kring after the election.  Their attacks wiped out Leos and, as Lodge faded, elected Kring.

Member of the City Council
Vote for Two Vote Count
Jordan Brandman
Lucille Kring
John Leos
Jennifer Rivera
Steven Albert Chavez Lodge
Linda Linder
Brian Neil Chuchua
Rodolfo “Rudy” Gaona
Duane Roberts		 26,332
25,464
19,051
14,091
13,834
13,456
9,534
7,703
6,914

So SOAR/DISNEY and ACOC supported Kring in two important ways:  (1) they suppressed the vote for her nearest opponent, John Leos, and (2) they chose not to suppress the vote for Kring — who was pointedly presenting herself as not being in Disney’s corner — in order to (as had been expected not so long before) elect Lodge.  They knew what they were doing.  So does Kring.  I estimate that this is an 80% lie.

[3] Never promised positions in her campaign literature:  Yeah, it’s true that “not one of those issues” — on preventing Giveaways, district elections, police reform, etc. —  “was ever there” in Kring “campaign literature.”  This statement is massively deceptive!  She apparently wants the listener to infer that  “not in my campaign literature” means that she never took positions on them.  But SHE DID TAKE POSITIONS!  She just didn’t print and distribute them in her campaign literature!

Jason Young published the goods on Kring yesterday over at Save Anaheim.  In summary, Kring promised to:

  • Vote no on a controversial $158-million hotel room tax subsidy.
  • Vote yes to a ballot measure for Anaheim residents to vote on all future hotel tax subsidies.
  • Vote yes to changing the City Council’s at large election system to a system by which council members are elected by districts.
  • Vote yes to a civilian oversight review board of police.

(You can get more details of when she said what in Jason’s piece.)  The Voice of OC continues the story:

Since being elected, Kring has changed her position on all four. She voted for the subsidy and against district elections; she vocally opposed a civilian police oversight board; and she refused to second a motion by the mayor to place the hotel tax subsidy voters measure on a citywide ballot.

This is hair-splitting of the highest order.  I’m being charitable in calling this only a 90% lie.

[4] She told the developers that she wouldn’t support their proposal:  She’s about to imply that her promising not to support a $158 million giveaway shouldn’t be taken to imply anything beyond that specific proposal.  (For example, that statement technically doesn’t rule out her supporting a $157,999,999 giveaway!)  Your feeling about that sort of technical misdirection will probably govern how much of a half-lie you consider this: given what she does next, I’ll call it a 55% lie, but if the next two ARE rated higher I might bargain it down to 49%.

[5] They did not bring that program back: No, they brought back something comparably bad — and in some ways clearly worse.  For one thing, Developer Bill O’Connell’s “money for nothin'” now extended out to a full 20 years.  I’ll call that a 65% lie.

[6] What they brought back was something good for the City.  Oh, no.  Look — for some people, this would not be a lie.  Kris Murray and Jordan Brandman, given their twisted views of what “good for the City” means in this respect, may consider it to be “good for the city.”  They’d be WRONG, but they wouldn’t be LYING about what they believed.  But I will submit to you that it is nearly impossible for someone to think that the original GardenWalk Giveaway was seriously objectionable and also that the revised GardenWalk Giveaway was magically rendered “good for the City.”  Those colors don’t mix.  This is a 75% lie — but we’ll combine this with the other ones and consider #4, 5, and 6 collectively to constitute only two lies.  (I do so try to be fair.)

[7] Literature never said she’d support Police Oversight Commission: Yeah, well so what?  No one cares what Kring’s literature said; they care what Kring herself said.  By the same reasoning as in #3 above, this counts as at least a 60% lie.

[8] The Police already have four levels of oversight and don’t want more:  For all I know, this is true; I’ll call it only a 5% lie just because of the splattered loss of credibility from elsewhere, but we’ll round it down to 0%.

[9] The majority of the Citizens do not want a Citizens’ Oversight Committee: If this was clearly labeled as her opinion, it might be wrong, but it wouldn’t be a lie.  As it stands, I deem it a 51% lie.  If she wants to prove otherwise, I guess she’ll have to put it on the ballot — which would be a fine idea anyway!  Until then, she has no basis to make this assertion.

[10] Kring voted to put Districts on the ballot in June: She did not vote for “districts,” she voted for an at-large system — classified as such according to state law! — with a candidate residency requirement.  She knew and knows damn well that people people used the word “districts” in 2012 they were talking about the ability to represent themselves.  She could have read the bloody ACLU lawsuit if she needed help; she’s supposedly some sort of lawyer.  If she had said flat out “this is all that I mean by the word ‘districts’ prior to the start of voting, she would not be on the City Council.  Counting 5% for the fig leaf explanation that is going to get waxed in court, I estimate this to be a 95% lie.

[11] Supported increase of the number of City Council seats from 5 to 7:  Yeah, and proponents wanted no less than 9.  Did she ever say “but not as many as 9” (eight plus the Mayor)?  If so, that I’ll move this down from a 40% lie to more like 20% — because she didn’t say it loud enough for people to believe otherwise.

[12] Voice of OC … only deems to persecute me for political reasons:  No, Ms. Kring: they’re in the business of calling out deceivers and liars.  And you, as a serial partial truth teller — and generally less than half-truth-teller during this 85 seconds showed yourself to be an inveterate deceiver and, by any but the most technical of standards, an outright liar.  A 99% lie!

That’s EIGHT >50% lies!  Almost one half-lie per each ten seconds!

Kring appeared to me to be working from notes during the Sept. 3 meeting — making the lies or all-but-lies premeditated, but if so she had memorized her speech well enough to keep her eyes almost continually fixed on what I presume would have been Fitzgerald’s hindquarters as he walked out of the room.

But I don’t know that she was working from notes.  So consider which would be worse: that she prepared such a narrowly parsed statement in advance so as to imply falsehoods without actually stating them brazenly, or that she is so practiced at this devious art that she was somehow able to produce these half-truths and quarter-truths and one-tenth truths on the fly?

Councilwoman Kring was basically daring people to call her a liar.  I gladly accept her offer.  Nothing that comes out of her mouth on political issues can be trusted anymore without its being subjected to the most skeptical scrutiny.  And then it will very likely come up wanting.

We can fact check you for the entire next year, Councilwoman Kring.  And we plan on it.

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)