"House of Lies" Gets New Occupant

This is the second in our close ups for the occupants of the “House of Lies”, Lake Forest’s own prime real estate where we can take a close look at the veracity of who’s saying what. The last article featured the antics of Scott Voigts. Today we focus on Council woman Kathy McCullough.

BACKGROUND

During the 2012 Candidate Forum I criticized the City Council for accepting money from “vested interests”. An angry Kathy McCullough, who was in the audience, came up to me at the conclusion of the forum and scolded me for telling lies. She claimed she never took any money from vested interests for her election campaigns. I told her I couldn’t list any specifics from memory, but I was pretty sure she had. Again she accused me of lying and I promised to do my homework and send her the facts. I promised to apologize publically if I was in error. I went home and sure enough, found more than $10,000 of “vested interest” money which she had accepted over the years (see tomorrow for a partial list). I sent the information to her and never heard back. Subsequently, several people told me that McCullough had been going around during the Candidate Forum telling people that I was lying. I shared with them the results of my investigation. So, not only had Mrs. McCullough been lying about not taking money from “vested interests”, she’d been lying about me. I guess, in the pantheon of liars, lying about lying is to be expected.

It was only a few months later when I found Mrs. McCullough once again stretching the truth, again about accepting money, and I revealed it in an editorial in The OC Register. To view that story Click here   Shortly after publication, she asked me to have lunch with her and her husband. We met at Denny’s and for nearly half an hour she spoke, nonstop, about everything she had done for the City, how hard she worked, etc. Each time I tried to interrupt she asked that I wait until she was finished, so I could see the “whole picture”. Because I was brought up to respect my elders, I sat there, finished my lunch and waited. Meanwhile, as she talked, she slowly took out a bunch of papers that eventually were piled more than a foot high. Finally, either from hunger or exhaustion, she took a breath and I got the chance to ask - “What specifically did I say that you think is untrue?” She rustled through the papers, continued chastising me, but eventually came up with nothing. The only offense she could come up with was that I used the word “claimed” in my editorial, and she didn’t like the way that sounded. Apparently nothing I wrote was incorrect, but she was upset because she didn’t like the way it sounded. It didn’t occur to her, that if what I said was factually true, perhaps it’s what she did that didn’t sound right, rather than my report of what she did.

Tomorrow I will report more fully on Mrs. McCullough. She’s up for re-election this year, so it’s fitting that her record comes before the public. You can expect that Mrs. McCullough will deny any of the facts included in the article, but when she bends your ear with allegations that it’s “all lies”, be sure to ask her what specifically is untrue.