Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

I got plenty of email, twitters, phone calls, and facebook inquiries:  “Hey, this is right up your alley:  Brian Blair was arrested for child abuse – why is there nothing on Sticks of Fire?”

The answer was that I didn’t buy it.

According to the reports, he was arrested around 5 in the morning, after shoving and hitting his kids an hour earlier.  TBO reported that “the attack” started after the kids came home from playing basketball.

I’m supposed to believe that his kids – one 17, one 12 or 13 – and two of their friends – age 15 and 18 – were just “playing basketball” in the wee hours of the morning?  And that this was tolerated by their parents?

Nope – I don’t think so.  Teenagers fail to think ahead, think they know everything, make bad decisions, and are generally jerks.  Some of them even (tween parents spoiler alert!) tell LIES in an attempt to cover up their stupidity.

The next day, the Times reports that the older son “ran away from home” at least six times – the last time after he got busted throwing a party at the house ’til 2am.

And then there is the mugshot.  You might have seen it in your newspapers, on local websites such as TBO.com (small), tampabay.com (medium), or on Creative Loafing’’s Political Whore blog, where Wayne Garcia put up such a huge image of Blair’s mugshot that your stalker can see it from the other side of the internet cafe.

Anyway, the mugshot indicates that Blair took a few punches – the assumption is that they came from at least one of those innocent teenagers.  A couple of days later, Blair’s friend said as much:

When the teens loudly came into the home at 4 a.m. on Sunday, along with two friends, Blair came out to talk to them.

“There was total disrespect and anger that came from his sons and their friends and things started getting out of control,” [Blair's friend Ed] Barbara said Blair told him…

That’s when he was “blindsided,” Barbara said. The blow sent him to the ground and then he felt the stomping begin. Barbara said Blair told him he didn’t know who hit or kicked, but he got “bruises on his ribs while he was being kicked on the ground.

Prosecutors investigated, and on Thursday dismissed the charges against Blair.  Turns out that when the younger son called 911, he told dispatchers that his brother had “gone crazy.”

Still, there are those who are unable to take an unbiased look (David Warner, perhaps?), and will be convinced that the fix is in.

Hey, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon.  Blair has plenty of detractors who read the headlines, assumed the worst, and used the event to poke him in the eye again and again and again and again.  (Funny that liberals are so gung-ho about “innocent until proven guilty,” yet some just can’t help but take their shots.)  (Yes, I know some conservatives are hypocrites, too.)

Don’t like his policy stances?  Me neither.  A terrible County Commissioner?  Agreed.  But none of that means he should be trampled at every opportunity.

Let’s use our heads once in a while, k?