Why isn’t anyone calling for firing of King County councilman for DUI?

Taken from The Dori Monson Show.

King County Councilman Reagan Dunn has pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in Kittitas County.

He revealed his plea to The Seattle Times. I will say, as spin goes, when you are in the middle of a nightmarish political story, a PR disaster, this is how you handle it. He said he first sought treatment in 2011 for an alcohol abuse problem, but it hasn’t stuck because he drove his pickup truck into a ditch last month in Kittitas County.

“What I did was wrong,” Dunn told the Times, calling it a “dumb and unfortunate” decision.

Last week, we had another incident with a government employee and a potential case of driving under the influence. A 32-year-old woman, an employee in the Governor’s Office of Indian Affairs, reportedly admitted to drinking before she lost control of her Lexus, crashing into a bar on July 26.

I asked the question a week ago: “Should somebody like that lose their job over that when they are a public employee?”

I’m going to ask again in the case of Reagan Dunn. The reason I keep bringing this up is because we have seen an increasingly zero-tolerance policy toward public figures.
Ray Rice knocks out his fiancé in a hotel elevator and he may never play again in the NFL. Adrian Peterson takes a switch to a 4-year-old boy and he may never play again. Their careers appear to be on the line because of what they did.

We seem to have a bit of a mania in this country for demanding that people get fired from their jobs when they do something that offends the public sensibilities. But in terms of what’s a threat to your family, to your and my children, a guy punching a woman in an elevator in Atlantic City is not an imminent threat to you and me here in the Puget Sound area. A guy taking a switch to his little boy in East Texas may be horrible, but it’s not a threat to your children.

But government officials driving drunk in Skagit County, in Kittitas County, that’s a threat. They’re a danger to our children, to our spouses, to our parents, to our friends.

Yet we demand the firing of the puncher and the switcher and the commissioner, but we give public officials a free pass for what is a far more grave threat to our family.

Now, I don’t expect every public official who gets a DUI to be fired. I’m not calling for the firing of Reagan Dunn or this woman in the governor’s office. But what I want to do is point out the hypocrisy of how people are viewing these stories if they are demanding Ray Rice’s firing and Roger Goodell’s and Adrian Peterson’s, but you give a pass to the drunk drivers. Why is that?

What Peterson and Ray Rice did were horrible things that affected one person each. Drunk drivers, as a group, kill tens of thousands of people every year. Every year, they tear apart and destroy lives and families and we give them the pass. Why?

Is it because, occasionally, you’ll get behind the wheel after having one too many and you don’t want your life turned upside down? You don’t want to lose your job. You don’t want to be caught in that, so you will give the drunks a break.

My question remains when we are zero tolerance on other people who commit horrible acts in the news and we demand their firing, aren’t we a bunch of hypocrites? Why do we care about these other offenders more than we care about a drunk driver, which is a much greater threat to our children?

I think we have a lot of societal hypocrisy. I remain at the same conclusion. Maybe we need to stop demanding the firing of the wife-punchers and the children-switchers so we can have some modicum of consistency, or go the other direction and fire all the people who drink and drive.
What do you think?

Taken from Thursday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.