As you have undoubtedly heard by now, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was traveling abroad in Ghana, Africa when the wildfires hit in California.
When she finally flew home, she had a stunning interaction with a reporter where she couldn’t even respond to basic questions.
What you may not know, unless you live in the Los Angeles area, is that when Karen Bass was running for mayor she promised that she would not go on international trips, something she liked to do frequently when she was a member of Congress.
To make matters worse, the Ghana trip wasn’t even the first time that she broke that promise.
Townhall reported:
Karen Bass Said She Wouldn’t Travel Internationally As Mayor. She Clearly Lied.
The devastation from the fires that swept California last week were made even worse by the Democratic leaders’ responses. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for instance, was away attending the new president’s inauguration in Ghana, leaving questions about who was running one of the country’s largest cities. What makes such a trip even worse is that Bass’ comments from 2021 are resurfacing in which she vowed not to take them.
The New York Times is going over Bass, highlighting her remarks from a little more than three years ago, in a piece Sunday night damningly titled, “Before Taking Office, L.A.’s Mayor Said She Would Not Go Abroad.”
It’s amazing that this was written in the pages of the New York Times:
“I went to Africa every couple of months, all the time,” she said, adding, “The idea of leaving that, especially the international work and the Africa work, I was like, ‘Mmm, I don’t think I want to do that.’”
She ultimately decided that she did, telling The Times that if she was elected mayor, “not only would I of course live here, but I also would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”
That pledge has been spectacularly broken.
When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles region on Tuesday, the mayor was on her way home from Ghana in West Africa, where she had attended the inauguration of a new president.
It was not her first trip abroad as mayor. A review of her public daily schedule for the past year shows that Ms. Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit — once to Mexico for the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum and three times to France for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Her broken promise to cut off overseas travel and her busy international schedule since becoming mayor in December 2022 scarcely registered with the public before the wildfires, and Los Angeles voters accepted — and in some cases even welcomed — the mayor’s identity not just as a municipal leader but also as a Washington-style global player. Now, though, her decision to leave the country at a time when the National Weather Service was warning of “extreme fire weather conditions” has set off a political crisis for Ms. Bass.
The political career of Karen Bass is over. If her handling of the fires was not evidence of that, these words in the New York Times certainly are. If the liberal media is going after her like this, she will never be elected to anything again, and that’s a good thing.
