Helen Ubinas tees off on double-talking mayor

Just minutes after I learned the Sixers Arena deal had collapsed like the team’s playoff hopes, I posted this on Facebook. I had no facts, just a half century of living in Philadelphia, and decades of covering Philadelphia politics.

I was busy with other issues and decided to pass on expanding that brief thought into a column.

Happily, the Inquirer’s Helen Ubinas did it for me, in a spectacular display of journalistic ass-kicking.

Usually, Helen and I see eye to eye on two issues — love of dogs and love of The Bronx, where we both were born.

But I am a centrist Democrat, and she is as woke as a rooster’s cock-a-doodle-doo. I hope this doesn’t irritate her. In a newsroom chat years ago, I said in passing she was a liberal and she pushed back hard, angered that I had pigeon-holed her. I had ruffled her feathers.

I was frankly amazed. First, there is nothing wrong with the liberal she obviously is. Progressive, really. Second, she doesn’t recognize most of her views are hard left? 

Anyway, I embedded a link to her column above, but sometimes the link doesn’t open for nonsubscribers to the newspaper.

That’s why I will kindly condense her column in the following paragraphs.

She opens with the “Sixers shocking decision” to walk away from a proposal they had spent two years fighting for.

Ubinas wondered aloud if she had missed the part where Mayor Cherelle Parker conceded that she had been played by billionaires, instead describing the new reality as a “win, win, win, win.” 

“Remember that September ‘I see you. I listened to you’ video where Parker addressed Chinatown residents’ opposition —and then rammed the project down their throats anyway?,” wrote Ubinas.

The marathon mayoral press conference was “long on words, but short on details.”

Somehow, the city’s flickering desire for a WNBA franchise got rolled into the presser.

“I, for one, will never forgive them for dragging national treasure Wanda Sykes into the mess,” she wrote, along with Sykes’ wife, both of whim are pushing the WNBA. “National treasure?” Different strokes.

The mayor dropped a lot of chum about a new Market Street East revitalization project, but “there is no proposal,” Parker finally conceded during her “filibuster,” Ubinas wrote.

She also scoffed at Parker’s trust that “the newly teamed-up Sixers and Comcast will follow through on a commitment to revitalize the struggling neighborhood.”

This was a “major blow” to the city, with the score “Billionaires: One, Philadelphians: Zero.”

Ubinas also criticized the dodging of City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who cautioned against Monday morning quarterbacking.

Ubinas dropped a penalty flag.

“Because y’all coulda stepped up and been honest and humble about this mess. Because it woulda help maybe regain some of the trust from city residents you have lost during this process. Because, c’mon man, you shoulda known better than to think you could get over on Philadelphians who can smell manure a mile away.”

There’s more.

“And when she and others who cosigned this circus get played, the very least they owe us is not to then try to play us, in turn.”

She closes, painfully for Parker, by reciting the mayor’s own standards back at her. 

“But on Monday, I couldn’t help but remember the countless times she has said Philadelphians should not judge her not by her words, but by her actions.

“You got it, mayor.”

Ouch!