Still Remorseless
If you didn’t already know it, you should now.
Former Minneapolis City Council Member, Dean Zimmermann is corrupt to his very core.
Finally sentenced for taking bribes from a developer, he said everything but that he took a bribe and that it was wrong to do so.
He attributed his problems to carelessness, to pot, to not being paranoid enough, to being off his game, to being set up, to being very busy, to everything but his own corrupt actions.
Zimmermann will enter treatment, of course, as is customary these days for disgraced public officials. In treatment, he will be asked to take ownership of what he has done and the damage he has caused. Unfortunately, if he is in Yankton, SD at the minimum security prison (a former college campus) that sentencing Judge Montgomery recommended, he will be in treatment with his fellow white collar criminals.
I doubt seriously whether anyone will really push Zimmermann to consider the contradiction of his sleazy games with a shady developer and his professed leftist passion for social justice. No one will bemoan the damage that Zimmermann has done to to Minneapolis left as he arrogantly flaunted his power as a cynical elected official.
But in treatment, Zimmermann will be confronted with this: he has been surrounded by a bunch of enablers, folks who are seemingly his supporters and friends who lack the wherewithal to call him on his shit, who fail to make him follow the rules that most of us do, who refuse to tell him when he is wrong or in trouble.
I expect that Zimmermann will turn this to his advantage. Already, the Green Party is spouting forth the Mea Culpas rather than condemning Zimmermann’s actions as reprehensible. And canny criminals often use prison treatment to absolve themselves by playing the game to shorten their sentence. Particularly white collar criminals. Just ask Basim Sabri.
The Minneapolis Issues List has been a metaphorical cacaphony of bleating Zimmersheep since his sentencing. The blindness to Zimmermann’s obvious betrayal of his constituents and left wing allies as he sat with his briber for hours schmoozing and expressing disappointment that he wasn’t invited to a Norm Coleman fund raiser is appalling. Don’t you all get it? Zimmermann was very comfortable having his chicken wings and rum and cokes with Gary Carlson.
Annie Young, a compadre of Zimmermann, says that a friend of Dean is going to write Zimmermann’s “autobiography.” That’s about right since rumor had it that he, whether stoned or not, did very little of his own work on the city council. If you can get someone to write your own “autobiography” for free, it just shows that you are a true leader.
Young alludes to a previous period of Zimmerexile, 3+ years after the infamous Minneapolis co-op wars. What she won’t say is what some co-op war survivors will tell you: that Dean Zimmermann was a thug who physically beat his perceived enemies, helping to create an atmosphere that left the local progressive community fragmented and disillusioned for years, some would say even to this day. Dean joined the weird Minneapolis leftist political cult “the O.”–an offshoot of the Co-0p Organization (C.O.) –described in detail in Alexandra Stein’s book Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult, for a time.
Interviewed by the Star Tribune in 2003, Zimmermann justified his involvement in the O.’s cultish psychological brutality thus:
People wanted a dramatic change in our society. And this co-op organization with the left-wing dogma exploited that deep, burning desire to transform our society in a way that would make it better for all and not just the privileged. We looked to Cuba, which had health care for everyone. We looked to China, which eradicated starvation. We thought we could transform our society and eliminate the chasm between the rich and the poor.
Same as it ever was. Dean Zimmermann always justifies his behavior, no matter how odious, by invoking his concern for the downtrodden and his leftist politics. The cant changes little. On the Left, that, not patriotism, is truly the last refuge of a scoundrel.
–Loosestrife
Original post by Loosestrife