������Ƶ

Dear Billy Kenoi, 

You spent almost $900 of taxpayers’ money in one night using your official government credit card at a “hostess bar” in Honolulu, where they charge only $3 for beer. You did this before, about half a decade earlier, but got caught by a dogged journalist. With your pants down, you apologized to us for using our taxes.

Why did you not apologize to the person whom you “patronized?” Online reviews make clear what often goes on in hostess bars. Why, in over a year, has our only criticism been your method of payment?

Did you say to yourself, “She’s just a hussy, not like my wife?” Did you feel like a real live king when she sat on your throne? How much did you spend before your cash ran out and you resorted to using your pCard?

Realistically, you know that many people cannot survive here, yet you rationalized that a woman working in such circumstances for a portion of economic security had a meaningful choice. More likely than not, she was foreign, poor, renting and uninsured. The coercion was there.

Even if you were just paying for drinks to ogle her and for a captive audience of your infamous theatrics, you transformed her into an object for your entertainment. You have a daughter. Don’t you hope that she will be more than just a ​body to a man one day?

Yours is not a story of deep self-criticism and rectification. It is not a story about second chances. Making things right means offering up your entire record to our scrutiny and following through on a course of action against corruption and sexual exploitation.

Instead, you are attempting to circle the wagons around yourself, manufacturing “community” support through a Facebook group and making children stand roadside with large signs cheering your name. You remain full of your own importance and refuse to resign from public office. Your impatience for redemption hints that there is more you are still hiding.

What brings up the most sadness is the community that tolerates your extreme corruption out of its desperation for progressive leadership. Violence against women is clearly not the subject of the community’s energy. And because naming and shaming is a blunder in local etiquette, no one had the volition or power to publicly attack your role in our tenacious sex industry. This demonstrates that our state is infected with sexist ideology.

To push back against that, we need to erase you. You do not get a pass. This is not about taking out a progressive voice. You are not one of us. You damage us.

This is in the hope that you quit soon and that we quit you sooner.