It's said that Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did no such thing -- she just took a taxpayer-funded trip to the Paris Olympics while cutting $17 million from the fire department's budget and ignoring the cries of her fire chief.
Three, actually. Three taxpayer-funded trips to the Paris Olympics that lasted two weeks. But just think of the miles she earned.
Sure, Bass was in Ghana on a White House junket when the fires broke out last week, but that was sheer dumb luck. A New York Times report today indicates that Bass views her position as part-time at best.
"A review of her public daily schedule for the past year shows that Ms. Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit," the NYT reported. "Once to Mexico for the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum and three times to France for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris."
It gets worse. Bass had explicitly promised during the 2022 mayoral race to reduce her foreign travel, even though she didn't want to.
...
Bass "spoke candidly," according to the Times, "about what she saw as a potential drawback to the job -- a lack of world travel and involvement in global affairs."
"I went to Africa every couple of months, all the time," she said in a 2021 interview. "The idea of leaving that, especially the international work and the Africa work, I was like, 'Mmm, I don't think I want to do that.'"
...
This was the promise she made then: "Not only would I of course live here, but I also would not travel internationally -- the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York, in relation to L.A."
This is what the NYT published today: "That pledge has been spectacularly broken."
As Robert Sterling put it on X, "The fact that this is the top story in the New York Times means the left is hanging her out to dry. They know she's toast, so they're sacrificing her to protect Newsom, their preferred candidate for 2028."