It doesn’t take long before the L.A. Times’ profile of new San Diego Mayor Bob Filner in Sunday’s paper makes it clear that we’re in for a piece that poses as a warts-and-all portrait but is more akin to hagiography. I know and like the reporter who wrote the piece, Tony Perry, who is an outstanding war correspondent when he’s not covering San Diego. But I’m surprised that Perry largely buys Filner’s narrative that he’s a well-meaning liberal trying to shake up a backwards city, and that if he’s brusque and a bully, it’s always for the greater good.