She ain't even preachin' to the choir no more

Linda?  You could probably use a break from all that exhausting no commenting you've been doing.  Let's join hands and skip down memory lane to happier times.

Remember your inauguration when everything was all exciting and you were the center of attention?  Good times.  That's when you looked out over the half-empty Forum auditorium and uttered these words:

"My prayer is for our city to come together, united in our common purpose, finding strength in our unity and together assuring the resurgence that will take place.

"With neither malice nor blame, as neither has any place in civil discourse, but with love for our city and for all of our fellow citizens, we must join hands in recognition of our collective future."

It would appear to us that God did not just say "no" to your prayer, he smote you for good measure.  Unfortunately innocent citizens are being endangered by the celestial schrapnel.

Linda, you know those pre-meeting prayers where much mention is made of those who have hardened their hearts against you?  Knock it off.  Not only have many hearts hardened into diamonds, God already told you "no" and now you're just pissing Him off.

What's that?  Fine.  We'll leave God out of it for the moment.

Let's just look at the facts after the election.  You won by 842 votes.  Yes, yes, we know one vote is enough, but it should have been a landslide.

The city is Democratic, majority black and you had the endorsement of the Ministerium.  You had money, consultants and a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) machine.  Your opponent was an underfunded, white, Jewish, male Republican who received no support from the county committee.  You should have creamed him, but you didn't. 

Could that cold, hard fact not penetrate your breathtaking hubris?  Could you not grasp your surprisingly slim margin of victory was empirical evidence of a city deeply divided?  You should have been building coalitions with citizens who weren't singing in your choir.

But that reaching out and building bridges thing isn't really you, is it?  You've got your own "special" style.

We tried to warn your advisors/handlers/wranglers in October 2009:

. . . given her “style” the citizenry may disinclined to join hands and sing “Kumbaya” and more interested in uniting to storm City Hall with torches and pitchforks.

See Linda?  We can prophesy too.  Just like Rev. Martin Odom of Bethel Village AME Church.

The Patriot-News seems to lack the gift.  It's hard to be a prophet when you can't see the trees on the wall or the writing in the forest because your head is up your ass. 

In its tiresome continuing series of Sunday editorials begging you to play nice, the newspaper wrote:

When she campaigned against then-Mayor Stephen Reed in 2009, Linda Thompson promised a new era of transparency and inclusiveness.

Instead, Mayor Thompson has hunkered down, literally, behind a locked office door.

In last week’s Patriot-News-WITF State of the City Poll . . . only 19 percent of residents viewed her favorably. Pollster Terry Madonna called it the worst job performance ratings he’d seen in 30 years of state and national polling.

As our State of the City Poll made clear, Mayor Thompson has few chances left to lead.

She can continue to hunker down like Steve Reed — but with none of his dynamism or vision — and watch events spin out of her control. Or she can open her locked door and be the transparent, inclusive leader she promised to be.

Linda, you're in serious trouble.  According to the the poll the bedrock of your base is eroding.  The choir is starting to leave and your inner circle has shrunk considerably.  To put it bluntly, you're so toxic that you can't even pay people to tolerate you.

After the Valentine's Day protest and the release of the poll you've made two highly controlled public appearances where you took no questions from the media.

One was the "keynote" speech for the annual meeting of the Harrisburg Young Professionals (HYP) where you read flatly from your prepared remarks and the second was when you promoted  Elija Massey from Detective to Captain, skipping several pay grades in the process.

Seems the newly captained Massey, who for the past year has been on your security detail as your driver and purse holder, raked in enough overtime to put his salary almost equal to yours.

At that event you dodged questions from the media with the assistance of Dr. Rev. Apostle Brenda Alton, Ombudsman, Acting Communications Director and Chief Enabler, who is more accustomed to chancel prancing than dealing professionally with the press.  Apostle Brenda managed to become the focus of a story when she got all high handed with a reporter attempting to get a comment from you.  Remember that transparency you promised?

We can see the scene from a completly different angle thanks to the Abraham Zapruder of Harrisburg media, the inestimable James Roxbury.  We are in awe that Mr. Roxbury always seems to know where the story is.  As he once explained to us, "No one ever looks around.  No one ever looks up."  We think that's good advice.  The Sword of Damocles is always overhead.

Which brings us to the present.  On Wednesday you decided to play the victim because who doesn't feel for a martyr?  This morning on PennLive the Patriot reported you had received communications you felt were "harrassing."  By afternoon they had trasmorgrified into "death threats" and according to the (corrected  from an earlier version) current story they have now been downgraded to "threats with racist overtones."

Wow.   If you can't get the harrassment/death threat thing straight, how can we have any confidence in your pronouncements we might actually give a shit about like boil water advisories or flood warnings?  You need to work on that.