So now the county executive has weighed in on the search for an MCC president.

In this morning's D&C, Maggie Brooks applauds the MCC board's majority for adding two local candidates to the list of finalists that the board's search committees came up with. And Brooks chastises the critics for "name calling, partisan sniping, and unwarranted public attacks on specific individuals and the process."

Brooks doesn't come right out and say that she wants a local candidate. But she says: "To even suggest that there is not one local person qualified to lead MCC is a very disturbing judgment of the talent in our region."

"Thankfully," she says, the majority of the trustees "didn't adhere to the national-is-better mentality."

Brooks should be honest: the criticism of the MCC board's majority has nothing to do with whether the finalists are local or not local. The criticism is that the MCC board seems determined to give the presidency to Bill Smith, who has no background in education and whose main claim to fame is that he was the Republican majority leader of the County Legislature.

Rumors about Smith and the presidency were circulating long before Smith was termed out from the legislature in December. If he's interested in the position, there's nothing wrong with his applying. There's nothing wrong with local business owner Dennis Kessler's applying, either. But two search committees reviewed both applications and decided that they weren't among the best candidates.

You'd think, from the attacks by Brooks and board trustee John Parrinello, that the search committee members are a bunch of lunatics or idiots. That's not at all the case. One committee is composed of faculty and staff. The other includes such community leaders as Sandy Parker, CEO of the Rochester Business Alliance; Len Redon, a Paychex executive; Richard Warshof, a retired Paychex executive; and Urban League executive director William Clark.

These are the kind of people who participated in the search for a new president and who decided that Bill Smith and Dennis Kessler are not the best candidates.

In a letter urging board chair Richard Guon to "abort" the search process, Parrinello implies that the search committees committed some kind of scullduggery, keeping their work secret from "the full board."

But Wayne Zyra, president of the County Legislature - a good, solid Republican - was a member of the search committee. He's also a member of the MCC board of trustees. Did he not tell Parrinello what the search committee was up to? Did Parrinello really just learn about all of this?

If Parrinello wanted a different kind of search, if he wanted only local candidates considered, he had a chance to do that long, long ago.

So, by the way, did Maggie Brooks.

Now, Parrinello is kicking up a fuss and trying to get the board to start the search process all over again. And Maggie Brooks is jumping right in there with him.

In her rant in the D&C this morning, Brooks says the county's exceptional community college is being hurt by all of this. She complains that "even before a final decision, we are witnessing a destructive conflict."

So when should critics - who include faculty, local business leaders, this newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle, and the Messenger-Post suburban weeklies - express ourselves? After the board votes?

"Stop the madness," she says.

Yes, indeed.

"Now is the time for the trustees and the MCC community to complete their interviews, without interference," she says.

Yes, ma'am!