A conservative columnist this week compared Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council to the surrendering French in World War II because the L.A. city leaders depend on Arizona's energy and water like Parisians depended on American troops. It's a stretch of a metaphor and maybe even a lame one, but it's entertaining to watch the two sides sharpen their claws.

A.W.R. Hawkins of the Human Events website takes city leadership to task for officially boycotting Arizona at a time when 25 percent of L.A.'s power and some of its water comes from the desert state. “The goofy liberals on Los Angeles' City Council have, with their boycott, cut off their own noses to spite their faces,” Hawkins writes.

He states that L.A.'s leaders are “like those vile Frenchmen, who long ago forgot that while they were dropping their rifles and raising their hands in surrender during World War II, our Midwestern farm boys were climbing off their tractors in order to climb into tanks and stave off ultimate defeat for the messieurs.”

It's worth a chuckle, but Hawkins fails to realize that at one of two Arizona-based power sources for L.A. is on sovereign, Native American land — and both are partially owned by City Hall. He doesn't seem to care that, while Arizona state power commissioner Gary Pierce got a lot of headlines by daring L.A. to walk away from Arizona power (and not, as was oft-reported, by threatening to turn off L.A.'s lights), Pierce and his fellow commissioners are basically powerless to deny the juice.

It's all political rhetoric at this point, although it would be miraculous to see the City Council actually do something painful — like unilaterally pulling its Arizona power plug — in the name of its convictions.

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