Burlington mayor: out of touch or crazy like a fox?

By Ted Cohen

The mayor of Burlington called one of her getting-too-numerous press briefings the other day to put out the word she is “sensitive” to alleged vulnerable populations being afraid of cops.

Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said they need have no worries - she will defend to the death the right of “sensitive” segments of Burlington's criminal population to be free of being arrested.

“Sensitive locations form the backbone of our communities,” Mulvaney-Stanak said without cracking a smile. “They are essential to thriving, healthy, and stable societies, but people need to trust that they are safe and accessible by everyone, including and especially our most vulnerable neighbors.”

The mayor, who ascribes to a “progressive” political playbook, pledged that she would make sure Burlington adheres to a cockamamie Vermont law forbidding police from throwing the cuffs on anyone in a church, hospital, school, church, synagogue, library or homeless shelter.

The real intent of the law, which took effect over the summer, is to keep federal immigration police, known as ICE agents, from arresting illegal aliens who are, well, taking shelter to avoid deportation.

Mulvaney-Stanak's promise to allow illegals as well as any other law breakers to hide behind her skirt comes amid a crisis in the central shopping district of her city.

The crisis is born purely of the tin-eared mayor’s failure to allow local police to freely enforce basic measures designed to keep law-abiding citizens safe from open illegal drug abuse and common civil crimes such as public indecency and what's commonly known as obstruction of public administration.

Rather than trying to make sure people walking the sidewalks and visiting the park behind her office are safe from accidental pokes from hypodermic needles dripping with heroin and out of the eyeshot of public defecation, the first-term mayor, who is likely to face a Democrat opponent in her expected re-election campaign early next year, has opted to crack down on citizen journalists filming inside City Hall.

Hard to make this stuff up, but it's actually life as we know it in northern Vermont’s bow to lawlessness.

It's a strange, hard-to-explain rationale until one examines who Mulvaney-Stanak believes to be her ticket to a second three-year term: radical leftists who claim oppression from the same government that is luring them with “free” meals and taxpayer-financed rooms to the welfare capital of the Green Mountain State.

It's no wonder Mulvaney-Stanak invokes the name Donald Trump in every other sentence she utters.

He's the guy who finally decided that liberals have been encouraging illegals to stream across the nation’s international borders because, yes, they are voters for the same democratic socialism that is now threatening to take France and Italy - and all of Western Europe as well as the U.S. - down to their knees.

Mulvaney-Stanak has clearly concluded that the bedfellows of those same anarchists are her political base in little old Burlington, Vermont.

She thinks she needs to uphold their right to insanity in order to bring them to the polls next March to give her another term of public crime, high taxes and an office in city hall established to defend “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

The question is whether Burlington's property owners - the ones whose outrageous taxes are supporting Mulvaney-Stanak's misdirected vision of a well-managed republic - will finally rise up and say, as iconic motivational speaker Susan Powter once famously intoned, “stop the insanity.”

One guy who is banking on such an uprising is Democrat Ben Traverse, the city council president threatening to run for mayor against his “progressive” friend.

Traverse has recently led a new effort to get Mulvaney-Stanak to start actually enforcing criminal statutes, evidence he understands where the votes may have been taking temporary shelter from common sense.

Those are the “sensitive” voters Mulvaney-Stanak is trying to persuade to stick with her for another insanely-expensive and criminal three years in the Queen City.

She apparently thinks they are still with her, the “sensitive” person that she purports to be even as her city is aflame, both literally and figuratively.

If they vote with their checkbooks, her sensitivity will receive a welcome “here's your hat, what’s your hurry?”

The fear among mortals is that nothing will change.