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Top
Politicos Taking Flak
In
an attempt to jump-start the slow news month of August,
pundits were either chronicling attacks against
Virginia’s
top politicians or making charges themselves.
Attorney
General and presumptive 2005 GOP gubernatorial nominee
Jerry Kilgore has had his hands full fending off
controversies in both Richmond and his native Scott
County. Margaret
Edds of the Virginian-Pilot
reviewed the “distractions — some niggling, some
serious.” She
doesn’t believe the long-running eavesdropping scandal
or the Election Board contretemps in Scott
County
threaten Kilgore’s standing in the Republican Party,
but it doesn’t make his “autopilot” road to
coronation “universal.”
Gov.
Mark R. Warner has been flying high since the
tax-raising end of the General Assembly, taking
leadership of the National
Governors Association, speaking at the Democratic
National Convention, and being identified
as a “rising star” in Newsweek.
Suddenly, from out of these cheery blue skies, Gregg
Easterbrook of The
New Republic identified Warner as the poster boy for
the “government waste” practice of using private
planes instead of flying commercial. Virginia’s
governor got a waiver to fly into Reagan National
Airport 46 times since September
11, 2001, far
surpassing the 26 flights of the next most prolific
user, Georgia’s
Republican Governor Sonny Purdue.
Easterbrook, a specialist in environmental
issues, charged that “the new private jets being sold
every year equate to three times the petroleum waste and
greenhouse-gas emissions of the new Hummers being sold
each year.”
Ed
Lynch of the Roanoke
Times, perhaps suffering from the effects of the
rain and humidity, issued an unusually mean-spirited
attack on Virginia State Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke. Edwards is seeking the Democratic nomination to
run for Attorney General in 2005. Lynch, a professor at Hollins
University,
wrote that Edwards “has an inflated, arrogant and
totally unwarranted image of his own accomplishments.”
He denounced an appearance the senator made as a
guest speaker in one of Lynch’s classes, claiming
Edwards spoke down to the students: “He even pronounced the words with exaggerated
slowness, as though doubtful that senior year political
science majors would understand what he was talking
about.”
It’s
hard to imagine Professor/Pundits Larry Sabato of UVA
and Robert Holsworth of VCU launching such a tirade
against a guest speaker in one of their classes.
If Lynch aspires to their lofty status, he might
want to stifle his partisan instincts and let his
students decide.
Media
Bias, Continued
The
charges of conservative or liberal bias against the
editorial boards of Virginia’s
newspapers are recurring phenomena.
In a Roanoke Times Guest Commentary column, retired Army Officer Max
Beyer took those charges to ridiculous lengths.
He attacked the man who made the space available
to him, Editorial Page Editor Tommy Denton. Beyer aimed at what he called the “Tommy Denton
Manifesto,” a long-forgotten piece from December 2000.
He claimed Denton
“glories in being biased” and “is an extremely
divisive voice being disseminated from a newspaper
having a monopolistic position in the community.” In a reckless, over-the-
top
reference, Denton's
editorial pages were accused of “taking a page of
instruction from the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.” When Goebbels gets mentioned, any serious
discussion of “media bias” is over.
Virginia’s
Obama
Barack
Obama, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate from
Illinois,
electrified the Democratic convention in Boston
with
his keynote address. According to Bob
Gibson of the Daily
Progress, Virginia Republicans boast a similarly
gifted speaker with a compelling personal story, former
Charlottesville Delegate Paul Harris. Harris is reported as mulling a race for Lt. Gov.
in 2009.
Lighten
Up, You’re on Vacation
Poor
Gordon Morse.
Even
on vacation in California, he
can’t resist using Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
“girlie men” remark to flog his pet analysis of how Virginia
went
to hell in a hand basket when Democrats tried to be nice
and Republicans got tough. His Washington
Post piece is one long
lament that Virginia Democrats “assumed voters
would remember all the good they had done” when they
faced a “hard, mean and relentless” challenge from
the GOP.
--
August 9, 2004
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