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Before
delivery of Sunday’s papers, the highlight of the
week was Patrick Lackey’s
commentary
on “slugs,” the daring commuters of
Northern Virginia
who make HOV lanes work without any VDOT
intervention whatsoever. Virginia
Pundit Watch was looking
threadbare.
Luckily,
Sunday’s pundits overwhelmed the slug story as
they gathered like vultures over what they saw as
conservative Republican carrion.
Flocking
to exploit a Hugh Lessig and Terry Scanlon Daily
Press story noted in this space last
week, pundits gleefully used GOP challenger Paul
Jost’s “Nazi” comment as a stepping-off point
for serious Republican-bashing.
Barney
Day, writing in the Daily
Press, had the most fun.
He accused Republicans of trying to
“out-idiot” each other and identified the former
“extremist wing” of the party as “dead center
fuselage now.” He
topped his column off with a rant on what he defined
as “Zen Republicanism.”
Jeff
Schapiro of the Richmond
Times-Dispatch called Jost a “kamikaze” for
former Gov. Jim Gilmore.
He placed the hapless Republican fundraiser
in the pantheon of famous Virginians with “foot in
mouth disease.” Susie
Dorsey of the Daily Press said it was
“scary” to think that Jost and Mike Rothfeld,
challenging Sen. John Chichester, R-Fredericksburg,
might win.
Meanwhile,
Scanlon
and Lessig, who broke the story, continued to
lead the way. They
reported that the Senate Republican caucus, which
had supposedly vowed to keep Paul Jost out if he
should defeat Sen. Tommy Norment, R-Williamsburg,
and win the general election, was furiously
backtracking. Two
Northern Virginia Republicans accepted Jost’s
apology and seem poised to welcome him if he should
win.
Rich
Response
Preston
Bryant offered
the gentle Republican view of primary challengers
and indiscrete comments in the Roanoke
Times: “The GOP is today's dominant political
party in Virginia, and
the party's embarrassment of riches is now beginning
to bring, well, embarrassments.”
Morse
Code
Gordon
Morse sent out two signals last week.
In his Daily
Press column, he pondered
the motives of those who advocated for and against
"deinstitutionalization" of the mentally
ill in Virginia.
Against the backdrop of a “gripe” session at
Eastern
State
Hospital,
Morse wondered if state employees were just trying
to protect their jobs or if they really were
concerned with patient care. He leaned toward the latter.
In the Washington
Post, however, Morse didn’t need to ponder the
motives
of Republicans. They
are “command and control” threats to “private
predilections.”
Richmond,Research This
In
response to Gov. Mark R. Warner’s call for
suggestions to improve university administration,
D.P.H. Hasselman, professor emeritus of engineering
at Virginia Tech, offered up horror
stories of state procurement snafus for research
equipment in a Roanoke
Times commentary.
To Hasselman, state procurement is “
Richmond,”
as in
Why
should someone in Richmond
have to approve a
purchase request after a contract for the purchase
has already been negotiated and signed? It would be
most embarrassing for a university to have to tell
the sponsor that the contract needs to be canceled
because someone in Richmond didn't approve it.
--
May 5, 2003
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