Is John Liu Fast Becoming The Asian Al Sharpton?

Apparently Councilmember John Liu’s constituency includes low-rent Chinese takeouts:

The scandal started when a patron of the restaurant called CW11 on Monday, January 29, claiming to have gotten a fried mouse in her take-out, according to [reporter Chris] Glorioso, who has been acting as the station’s spokesman on the matter. He said he received the assignment upon getting to work at 3 p.m., and was out inspecting the grisly morsel at the woman’s house by 5 p.m. He then went over to the restaurant to confront the cook, who maintained the meat was just a mouse-shaped piece of chicken.

Glorioso said he picked up the meat in a plastic-gloved hand and showed it to “at least a dozen people” standing around the restaurant who agreed that it looked awfully rodent-like.

Nevertheless, he said his assignment desk did make a few attempts to get a laboratory back up to the woman’s claim — including calling the city’s health department — before News at Ten’s deadline, but no lab was open at that hour. He said there wasn’t a great deal of debate about what the right thing to do was, and stressed how guilty he would feel if someone got sick eating at the restaurant — which had been cited for “evidence of mice” three times in the past three years — while the station waited to get a second opinion.

But just what constituted “common sense” — and indeed, knowledge itself — was the subject of the screaming match during Sunday’s icy protest. Liu considered it unforgivable that the station would have run the original story without getting laboratory confirmation first. But he stepped into a debater’s trap when he said, “The reality is, all you needed to do was stick a fork in that piece of chicken to determine there was no hair, there was no skin, there were no bones,” since this implied that regular folk, not just trained biologists, are capable of figuring out what kind of animal was fried beyond recognition in the oil vats that day.

Liu and the restaurant’s lawyers are disputing the biologist’s report, claiming it was “rife with spelling errors” and that the station did not follow proper forensic procedure in the chain of handling the evidence.

Evidence aside, the real crime in Liu’s mind was the little quip about “fried mice” — a play on fried rice — in the introduction to the original piece, which he said made the whole segment racist.