I didn’t do anything on this controversy last week, because I wanted to give a few days to watch the fallout from it. And I wasn’t too disappointed.

This was Gov. Jeff Landry on Tuesday, asked about the “rift” between himself and New Orleans’ mayor Helena Moreno…

Moreno’s response was a dog’s breakfast of non sequiturs. She sounded like a preschool mom saying that all kids are special in their own unique way.

Which is nonsense. There is not, and has never really been, a good reason why New Orleans needed four assessors or two clerks of court. The argument for such Byzantine governmental structures was never very good, but it got a whole lot worse when Orleans Parish slid from the most populous parish in the state to third. Orleans isn’t even the biggest population center in the New Orleans area – Jefferson Parish is, and by a healthy amount. Give it another 20 years and St. Tammany will probably also pass Orleans.

The argument against Landry, if we’re charitable enough not to reduce it to what it really is, which is “Jeff Landry is a poopy-head,” is that New Orleans IS special because of its culture and music and the Saints and Jazz Fest.

Which is an intentional obtuseness, a performative stupidity that we see virtually nonstop among Democrats these days. I did an American Spectator column on that subject last week – I could have included this episode as one of the examples.

And Moreno attracted defenders among the political class in the Big Easy. Here’s state representative Alonzo Knox…

And he punctuated that with an infographic picture…

Again, none of this is relevant to the topic of why Louisiana’s third most populous parish needed two clerks of court.

The size of a hotel base and the quality of the cuisine in a city has nothing to do with the absolute dysfunction of its political class, and it especially does nothing to excuse the corruption of that political class.

Let’s remember that the “rift” between Jeff Landry and Helena Moreno started with some basic good-government reforms that Republican legislators brought in an effort to address the judicial system in New Orleans that everyone in Louisiana knows is an insult to the concept of justice. New Orleans has oodles of judges and most of them are incompetents and idiots who can barely run a courtroom, much less conduct a reputable trial or interpret the law. This has been known for decades.

So legislation was brought to trim the number of judges to reflect the population of Orleans Parish vis-a-vis the rest of the state, and to consolidate the clerk of court’s office into one hierarchy rather than having an inefficient separation of the civil and criminal functions.

And Moreno, Jason Williams, the Soros DA in Orleans Parish, and several members of New Orleans’ horrific city council got together, after the clerk of court bill became law, in an effort to call an illegal election to replace the duly-elected clerk of court. The state’s Attorney General Liz Murrill sent them letters saying that they couldn’t call an election to replace an elected official who was still lawfully in her job, and explained to them that there is a law on the books which makes that a crime and that if they went through with their stupid plan they’d get prosecuted.

Bear in mind that Chelsea Napoleon, the clerk of court in Orleans, is a black Democrat. Elected by the same voters who elected Moreno and Williams. And when Murrill wrote that letter she was defending Napoleon.

Under no theory are the crooked pols in the city who started this fight and then escalated it by goading a grand jury into indicting Murrill over that letter she sent to them on the right side of the law or morality.

And this is happening while New Orleans’ public finances are so fouled up that they’re trying to get the state bond commission to approve a massive loan to bail out the city.

And when Landry calls these people out for the absolute idiocy of the situation they created, and notes how poorly it’s received by the rest of the state, we get Moreno and Knox talking about restaurants and bars.

Landry isn’t talking about restaurants and bars. He’s talking about you, you fools. When he says “New Orleans,” everybody with a brain gets that he’s talking about the ridiculous politicians. He isn’t talking about the business community or the Saints or the bands who play at Tipitina’s.

And frankly, hiding behind those people makes this all the more irritating. It’s going to create worse and worse results. And whining about the downward spiral, or bearing it as a badge of idiot honor rather than fixing the problem which put them here in the first place, is not what credible, serious or intelligent people do.

Let’s also remember that what good things are going on in New Orleans have nothing to do with the political class there. Take crime, for example – the city is a hell of a lot safer now than it was three years ago. That’s a Jeff Landry project – he put the state police into the city and Murrill injected the AG’s office into prosecuting criminals as had never been done before. Blight cleanup, the lessening of the homeless problem, improvements at the Port of New Orleans, which is a state entity and not a City of New Orleans entity. I could go on and on.

They’ve got nothing to do with any of that. They’ve produced zero. They’ve offered no thanks to Landry or any of the other folks elsewhere in the state, including in neighboring parishes, for the work that has been done to prop up a city they’ve assiduously worked to destroy.

And now that Landry is venting his fury at these people for the open hostility they showed to the rule of law – and whether you like Jeff Landry or not, Moreno and her band of morons at City Hall are guilty of this – what we get is a defense of hotels, bars and restaurants.

The proper response to this rhymes with “Truck Blue.”

And the more the political class in New Orleans carries on, the more intransigent everyone else in Louisiana should be about giving these people any further governmental resources from the state.