Mayor Oscar Goodman, contrasting himself to a radio disc jockey who got a citation for feeding homeless people, actually said this: “I’m constantly out in the community trying to make it a better place — not as a person who loves publicity, but as a person who loves Las Vegas.”

Right.

But here’s the thing: Goodman doesn’t love Las Vegas enough to, say, pay the salaries of the city video crew that once taped a giant martini party the mayor had and worked overtime to produce a video news release mailed out the next day. (They do so on orders of his ersatz “chief of staff” Stephanie Boixo, who is now the mayor’s daughter-in-law.) He doesn’t love Las Vegas enough to defray the taxpayer expense in producing mayoral bobblehead dolls. He doesn’t love Las Vegas enough to refrain from endorsing gin, photographing Playboy models or go places unescorted by taxpayer-financed showgirls and Elvis impersonators.

Goodman, saying he doesn’t love publicity? That’s absurd!

C’mon, mayor. Admit it. You love the limelight. You eat it up. It’s your bag, baby. And people love you for it, along with your much-ballyhooed candor. If you’re going to start going around telling people you don’t love publicity, you may as well give up drinking, showgirls, gambling and using your position in government to try to help your sons. Those are the things that make you who you are!

Goodman, eschewing publicity. Next thing you’ll tell us, Bob Beers wants to raise taxes with the support of the Review-Journal’s editorial page, Chuck Muth will start dating Francis Allen and President George W. Bush and Ann Coulter will go on live TV to admit, and apologize for, all their mistakes! Please!

We’re just not that gullible.

Everybody makes mistakes, even us at Various Things & Stuff. We don’t want to rub it in (too much) but a couple of recent errors caught our eye.

• First, the Las Vegas Sun’s new Washington, D.C. reporter Lisa Mascaro shouldn’t be judged too harshly for her Aug. 9 piece, in which she reported that U.S. Sen. Harry Reid was “a longtime abortion-rights supporter.”

Most people in Nevada, we’re convinced, think that Reid is pro-choice, which he’s not. Reid is far less liberal than people actually think, but through years of consummate political skill, he has political camouflage that makes the Predator aliens of movie fame look naked.

Then again, there was a wee bit of a clue for Mascaro in that she was writing about Reid ’s actions in regard to that bill by U.S. Sen. John Ensign that would prohibit taking a teenager across state lines in order to get an abortion so as to avoid parental consent laws. If Reid really was pro-choice, why would he have voted in favor of Ensign’s bill?

But then again, after the bill passed, Reid allowed his lieutenant, U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., to put a hold on it. Presto! The pro-life Reid looks pro-choice, on paper at least. The paper set the record straight on Aug. 11.

• We also enjoyed the bevy of corrections in Saturday’sReview-Journal, but none more than the one for Ken White’s story about ratings for local television programs.

In an apparent haste to tar Face to Face with Jon Ralston, White mistakenly said the show — which appears on Las Vegas ONE (Cox Communications Channel 19) — airs first at 11 a.m., with a mere 130 viewers. In fact, the R-J admitted, the show first airs at 5:30 p.m., and has 156 viewers, according to Nielsen research.

Not a big difference, to be sure, but still an indication that White hadn’t actually watched the program enough to write about it.

Then again, we should cut him a little slack, too. It’s much harder writing original copy rather than, say, cut-and-pasting text out of Clark County news releases. (See sixth item.)

With U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman being lionized by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, it’s clear the voters of Connecticut made the right call in rejecting him last week. Our corporate overlord Sherm Frederick even got into the act, saying it’s hard out there for a conservative Democrat, and comparing Lieberman to our own Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson.

We totally agree, Corporate Overlord. Jim Gibson is a hell of a lot like Lieberman. But that’s not a good thing!

Before we go on, let’s dispense with this nonsense of party leaders like Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, steering the party to the left in the Lieberman race. Major figures in the Democratic Party, including former President Bill Clinton, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (hardly a conservative) and former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland all turned out to campaign hard for Lieberman. And major figures like our own U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and U.S. Sen. John Kerry didn’t endorse Lieberman’s antiwar challenger Ned Lamont until after Lieberman had lost.

And, at this point, it’s worth noting something: Lieberman is a whiney bitch who would do pretty much anything to hold on to his seat. It could be the only way he gets anybody to listen to him.

Remember six years ago, when Lieberman was running for vice president with Al Gore? Instead of giving up his Connecticut Senate seat and committing fully to the presidential race, Lieberman also campaigned for re-election in Connecticut. He lost the big race, but won his senatorial consolation prize, and left Democrats wondering how committed he was to beating George W. Bush in the first place.

(Ironically enough, we think he did beat Bush. But instead of challenging the election results, he simply rolled over.)

Now, six years later, Lieberman is also doing a two-step, running as a Democrat, but, when polls showed he was trailing Lamont because of his pro-war, pro-Bush stances, he made arrangements to run as an “independent Democrat” in the November general election. Sure enough, he lost again, but is planning a rear-guard action to try to hold on to his precious seat.

He claims noble aspirations, saving his party and the Senate from partisanship. But we believe the motive is more base: Winning at all costs.

Our evidence? First, Lieberman says nothing when his strange-bedfellow allies say things like this in his defense:

“The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, [from] the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al-Qaida types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete our task.” — Vice President Dick Cheney

“It’s a defining moment for the Democratic Party whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they’re going to come after you.” — White House press secretary Tony Snow

Lieberman was “a voice of support for Israel” who had been “silenced by the Democratic Party.” — From a newspaper ad taken out by the Republican Jewish Coalition. (Yes, we too are surprised that there is such a thing.)

Cheney and Snow are beyond shame, but the Republican Jewish Coalition should feel a good bit of it after that ad. Anti-Semitism is real, as Mel Gibson has reminded us. But Lieberman’s defeat didn’t have a damn thing to do with his race, and they know it. That makes them charlatans.

But it’s little wonder that Lieberman says nothing. Because after the latest anti-terror plot was foiled by authorities in Pakistan and Great Britain, here’s what Lieberman himself said: The anti-war views of Ned Lamont would “be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to below up these planes in this plot hatched in England.”

With that remark, Lieberman graduates from whiney bitch to something far, far worse: A political campaigner in the mold of Karl Rove, willing to say or do anything to gain office. Can there be a greater reason to deny it to him?