The following letter is online at Leesburg Today. It presents even more troubling information about the threatening political climate that came spectacularly into public view with the exposure of two violent images sent by Loudoun Republican leaders.
This is the first I’ve heard about the threatening phone calls to League of Women Voters members, or the harassment of the Electoral Board.
Where are our investigative reporters?
Like Sarah Palin’s bull’s eye on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s congressional district, the Loudoun County Republican Committee’s image of President Barak Obama with a bullet hole in his head adds to the violent imagery that has increasingly taken over public discourse in this nation.
This is not a single, anomalous event in recent Loudoun politics. A significant factor behind the Loudoun League of Women Voters cancellation of a candidate forum for this election was threats made to LLWV members by phone at their homes by advocates of concealed weapons, and the League’s concern about the cost and adequacy of security for what has been a regular voter education event.
Sterling District Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio’s bloody handprint in literature denouncing homosexuality is another item to add to the pile.
On a lesser scale, meetings of Loudoun’s Electoral Board have been disrupted by groups of Tea Party supporters with complaints about and demands for information on the cost of setting up new precincts for Loudoun’s growing population. And the posting of a “Don’t Re-Nig” image with a crossed out Obama for President logo further underlines the tenor of debate that has become common in Loudoun, despite its affluent, educated population.
Responses to this evidence of the precipitous descent of our political dialogue in Loudoun have been of the early adolescent variety (i.e., “Jimmy did it too”). Chairman of the Loudoun Board of Supervisors Scott York, for example, has seemed to equate the Loudoun County Republican Committee’s published slick image of a bullet-ridden President Obama with private renderings of former President George W. Bush with a mustache drawn on his face.
Loudoun’s adolescents, not to mention younger children, should pay close attention to the behavior of these Loudoun parents, and worry about the new, dark legacy being left to them.
Martha Polkey, Lucketts
t2c, thank you for all your investigative work. We’ve been trying here to make the necessary distinction between whatever it takes to win elections and character, a distinction that seems to have been lost on some of our local Republican friends. Whereas before election day there was discussion about the LCRC chair being replaced because his actions demonstrated a lack of character and judgment, that has all gone by the wayside now. The only metric in which they are interested is results, and they won. I’m afraid that “wisdom” will have been redefined as “winning,” by any means necessary, anything goes.
It’s significant that the LCRC chair is an acolyte of Eugene Delgaudio, the incumbent supervisor who sent out the other violent image just before the election, as the header of a fundraising email for the hate group he runs. If you haven’t yet, check out the local news story about that image and the lie he told about it. That lie now represents the new standard of what’s acceptable in campaign behavior, at least in Loudoun. They have no reason to refrain from anything, at least that’s what I’m hearing in the post-election commentary.
Thank you!
If you’re interested in an investigation into the origins of the Zombama image, there’s a longer piece on this at: http://text2cloud.com/2011/11/mischief-night-obama-zombies-in-context/
Although the image is clearly protected speech, we might get somewhere if we had discussions about the wisdom of circulating such images. Wisdom allows us to refrain from all sorts of actions we are free to carry out.