These are the worst of times?

It's unfathomable, radical, outrageous.

Catastrophic, devastating, unprecedented.

It's the end of (fill in blank) as we know it.

These are words and phrases used recently by local politicians to describe this and that. Their budgets. An escaped mental patient. The prospect that it might flood in the Kent Valley this winter.

Remember Jackie Chiles, the bombastic lawyer on the Seinfeld TV show?

"That's outrageous, egregious, preposterous!" he'd say, whenever anyone told him anything, no matter how mundane.

Lately I've been feeling like we're being led by gaggles of Jackie Chiles. Only far less entertaining.

Take King County government. The new budget came out this week. It was branded "devastating" and "radical" because like all budgets these days, it is less than hoped for.

A typical quote from a county councilman: "What we're witnessing is the systematic dismantling of county government."

Really? The county's general budget will be 4 percent less than the last one. I looked up some past budgets and the new one is the same amount of money, $620 million, that the county spent in 2007. It's still 14 percent more than the county spent in 2005.

About 150 of 14,000 county employees are being laid off — a jobs cut of 1 percent.

To quote the Seinfeld show again: Oh, the humanity!

I work at a company that has lost about a third of its staff. Near our office, I often walk by a four-story architecture office in which the entire first floor now sits empty. Project files dated 2005 or 2006 are scattered in abandoned cubicles. It's like a boom-time museum.

I'm not saying what King County is going through is easy. But can we have a little perspective from our leaders, please?

Same with the story of the "insane killer" who escaped recently at the county fair. I'll be the first to say: It's really fun to say the words "insane killer" and "county fair" in the same sentence. So we in the media said it as many times as we could.

But the phrase evokes a man with a hockey mask and a chain saw running through crowds of children. Not necessarily the mental patient who was judged to be criminally insane in 1987 but has been in and out of treatment ever since, including multiple stints when he was free to work at a furniture store or attend community college.

The governor said it was "unfathomable" this patient could go on a supervised field trip. Yet earlier this year the same patient was living in a boarding house in Spokane, where he was free to come and go. Or join a host of "offsite activities, including day trips to local lakes and campgrounds, the Civic Theatre, YMCA passes for swimming, shopping trips, and baseball and hockey games," says the home's Web site. It's all part of therapy for people with mental problems.

If an insane killer being escorted by state staff to a fair is "unfathomable," then what would we call it when that same insane killer was out in society essentially free? Infinitely unfathomable? Double-secret incomprehensible?

My point is that these are complex, difficult issues. What to do with mental patients with violent histories is not simple. Nor is how to best keep the government going with less money. The histrionics, coming from the top no less, seem less about solving than exploiting.

In other cases, maybe hype is the only way to get our attention. But it comes with a cost.

Now they have decreed so many times that the Kent Valley will be the next Katrina that they've caused a mini-crisis: The insurance companies ran for the hills, leaving Valley-ites between a rock and a sandbag.

I tell you, it's nefarious, ludicrous, scandalous.

Seriously, if something truly bad ever does happen around here? There won't be the words to describe it.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.