Commentary: Kilpatrick's digs show contempt for those he left behind
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It's a house fit for a heart surgeon who saves seven lives a day or an entrepreneur who recently sold his digital gizmo firm to a public company. It's a house, even, for a software salesman who has risen to the top of his profession, improbably scooping up new accounts on the shoals of recession.
But the bloated, 5,866 square foot suburban Chateau Kwame Kilpatrick in Southlake, Texas, is an insult to those he left behind.
Read him loud and clear: His digs scream contempt for those he's left oh so far behind.
From his superbly-landscaped pool, a mini-lake with gardens surrounding it, to the cavernous recesses of his new closets, he's enjoying the perks and entitlements that a fall from grace unexpectedly brings a notorious mayor.
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Think of the suckers who admired and trusted him, who believed his renaissance patter. Think of Lou Beatty, the schmo, who overpaid for the Kilpatricks' old house, then lost his wife Christine, and then lost the house, too, in a cascade of misfortune.
Kilpatrick? He and wife Carlita doubled their money off the Beattys, as The News' David Josar has reported. They castled up the Manoogian, too, before he split -- first to Tallahassee, then to the Wayne County Jail, then on to this enclave of suburban privilege in Southlake, Texas.
Let Detroit -- with its bottomed-out housing values, its trashed public schools, and depleted resources -- pick up the shards. It's not his fault that people here are too dumb or slow or just in hock to get out of Dodge, as he has. At his gated and gentrified mini-palace, Kilpatrick can pull up an oversized chair to his big screen TV. Maybe he caught Stephen Colbert, in Iraq, ridiculing Detroit as the more awful location.
Kwame Kilpatrick is skating faster than Pavel Datsyuk, trying to prove he's not scarred by disast
Commentary: Kilpatrick's digs show contempt for those he left behind
http://www.detroitnews.com/graphics/...auraBerman.jpg
It's a house fit for a heart surgeon who saves seven lives a day or an entrepreneur who recently sold his digital gizmo firm to a public company. It's a house, even, for a software salesman who has risen to the top of his profession, improbably scooping up new accounts on the shoals of recession.
But the bloated, 5,866 square foot suburban Chateau Kwame Kilpatrick in Southlake, Texas, is an insult to those he left behind.
Read him loud and clear: His digs scream contempt for those he's left oh so far behind.
From his superbly-landscaped pool, a mini-lake with gardens surrounding it, to the cavernous recesses of his new closets, he's enjoying the perks and entitlements that a fall from grace unexpectedly brings a notorious mayor.
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Think of the suckers who admired and trusted him, who believed his renaissance patter. Think of Lou Beatty, the schmo, who overpaid for the Kilpatricks' old house, then lost his wife Christine, and then lost the house, too, in a cascade of misfortune.
Kilpatrick? He and wife Carlita doubled their money off the Beattys, as The News' David Josar has reported. They castled up the Manoogian, too, before he split -- first to Tallahassee, then to the Wayne County Jail, then on to this enclave of suburban privilege in Southlake, Texas.
Let Detroit -- with its bottomed-out housing values, its trashed public schools, and depleted resources -- pick up the shards. It's not his fault that people here are too dumb or slow or just in hock to get out of Dodge, as he has. At his gated and gentrified mini-palace, Kilpatrick can pull up an oversized chair to his big screen TV. Maybe he caught Stephen Colbert, in Iraq, ridiculing Detroit as the more awful location.
Kwame Kilpatrick is skating faster than Pavel Datsyuk, trying to prove he's not scarred by disaster: Be clear: He hasn't gone all humble pie on us. He's the arrogant guy we got to know.
How can he possibly afford to maintain that new leased pad -- $1.1 million but now off the market -- with its five or six bedrooms, its jetted tubs and wood-burning oven, the backyard that looks like a Ritz-Carlton ad?
A patron is subsidizing his extravagant lifestyle. Surely that's the case. Can a patron be paying the bills for landscaping, air-conditioning, termite control, alarm companies, and all of the other expenses that attend the expansive, gentry lifestyle he's so gracefully segued into?
Detroiters are living on Baltic Avenue. He's living on Park Place.
And so far, when he lands on jail, he's just visiting.er: Be clear: He hasn't gone all humble pie on us. He's the arrogant guy we got to know.
How can he possibly afford to maintain that new leased pad -- $1.1 million but now off the market -- with its five or six bedrooms, its jetted tubs and wood-burning oven, the backyard that looks like a Ritz-Carlton ad?
A patron is subsidizing his extravagant lifestyle. Surely that's the case. Can a patron be paying the bills for landscaping, air-conditioning, termite control, alarm companies, and all of the other expenses that attend the expansive, gentry lifestyle he's so gracefully segued into?
Detroiters are living on Baltic Avenue. He's living on Park Place.
And so far, when he lands on jail, he's just visiting.
