The other day Jason linked to a Cape Gazette story about mudslinging — literally — in a Sussex County Council race, as a Councilman John Reiley was accused of unethical behavior for accepting many truckloads of dirt from a developer.
His accuser was fellow Councilman Mark Schaeffer, erstwhile mayor of Smyrna, where he generated controversy almost as fast as building permits around the turn of the millennium. (This letter to the editor of the Cape Gazette recaps his career, which would need a lot more white squares to qualify as checkered.)
Schaeffer threw his stink bomb during a council meeting, angering council President Mike Vincent, who uttered one of the most cluelessly ironic things I’ve ever heard a public official say on the record.
“I’m tired of these politics,” Vincent declared. “This is Sussex County, and to do some of the things that have been done in this political race is a disgrace.”
He’s got to be fucking kidding. Yeah, it’s Sussex County, all right. And given its political history since the turn of the century, this doesn’t even make the top 10 list.
SuxCo is the place where Vincent’s predecessor, Republican poobah Vance Phillips, left the state in disgrace after a sex scandal involving his grooming of an 18-year-old aide. Where Republican Eric Bodenweiser had to withdraw from a race for the state legislature when he was indicted on felony charges in a different sex scandal.
SuxCo is where state Sen. Brian Pettyjohn got re-elected after receiving a slap on the wrist for taking a loaded gun aboard an airplane. Where its onetime sheriff, Jeff Christopher, refused to accept that he couldn’t act as a police officer until the state Supreme Court slapped him down.
SuxCo is where the County Council spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in court defending its practice of opening meetings with a Christian prayer. Where a school district had to spend taxpayer money settling a lawsuit by two Jewish families over its insistence on Christian prayers at school events — and then harassed one of the families so badly they left the county (the other wisely stayed anonymous).
SuxCo is where onetime state Rep. John Atkins embroiled himself in a years-long string of behavior so bad the GOP kicked him out. It’s where nominal Democrat Pete Schwartzkopf wagered that SuxCo voters didn’t care, welcomed him into the Democratic Party, and saw Atkins re-elected. Which brings us to another SuxCo nominal Democrat, Kathy McGuiness, who’s such a self-dealing narcissist she can’t see anything wrong with the corruption she’s been convicted of.
Reiley didn’t deny accepting the soil, but he did deny it was unethical. His defense was, basically, that everybody does it. This is the same defense McGuiness deployed at her trial — hiring her own daughter couldn’t be wrong if everyone else was doing it. Had the venue been SuxCo, it would have worked.
Reiley and McGuiness might be right about everyone doing it. They’re wrong about that making it OK. Similarly, Schaeffer is right about the ethics of Reiley accepting the gift, but wrong about it being an offense Reiley should resign over. If Schaeffer held himself to that standard he would have resigned from every public position he previously held.
Vincent, for his part, seems to walk around in a permanent state of denial. I have no idea what he did before getting elected — he’s a lifelong Seaford resident but his bios say nothing about any work history, just that he was a poobah at the local volunteer fire company — but back in 2014, in the wake of I can’t recall which scandal, Vincent played the same “shocked, shocked!” card, penning a News Journal op-ed claiming that Sussex County was being misrepresented.
Sorry, Mike. I don’t know if you’re trying to convince others or only yourself. Delaware’s other two counties exhibit plenty of graft, self-dealing and petty assholishness among its political classes, but on a per capita basis, they can’t compete with the smug ignorance and casual corruption that make Sussex County’s politics the scummiest in the state.
There is one part of his statement I do agree with: It’s a disgrace.