The Bell Curve:

Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor is one up on Mel Gibson. Gibson had to be high on the juice to share his anti-Semitic bile with the world. Mansoor was apparently dead sober when he laid a shooting in Costa Mesa on "job centers, soup kitchens and a high concentration of downscale rental units." Oh, yes, and on "social workers holding the hand of a hardened gang member."

That's where Mansoor's bile is located. And he doesn't have to get high on booze to share it with us because he's absolutely convinced of its rightness — which makes him a little more dangerous than the Gibsons of this world who have to backpedal furiously to try to prevent collateral damage every time they lose control of their mouths.

This is a familiar process with tough guys in control — and Mansoor qualifies on both counts. They twist whatever they are handed into support for their biases.

The Bush people did this with 9/11. They used the tragedy of the twin towers to justify an attack on Iraq when there was no connection between the two. Mansoor used a tragic local shooting to trash people who give of their time and skills and effort to offer food and counsel and healthcare to those who sorely need it. And to demean people who live in sub-standard housing and seek menial work.

He had no evidence that this laundry list of his biases was in any way connected with the shooting. He saw only that the shooting offered him a chance for a cheap shot at activities he would like to run out of town.

Given a chance to backpedal, Mansoor got in deeper. In a follow-up story in the Pilot, Mansoor made the routine expression of sympathy for the victims, then used that as a launching pad to say: "My comments were directed at the criminals that were involved in this incident…. Families in the community clearly want us to remove the welcome mat for the gang members and other criminals."

I wonder how many families in "downscale rental units" he talked to before he made this sweeping statement? Or if he read the comments of a 17-year-old boy wounded in the attack who told a Pilot reporter: "He doesn't know what he's talking about. If he lived here … he would see that there are a lot of hardworking people and no gang members."

Or the neighbor of the victims who said: "He's talking about soup kitchens. What does that have to do with what happened here?"

What, indeed?