Tag Archives: politics

The futility of political discourse?

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What a civil political forum looks like

What a civil political forum looks like

Has our political discourse grown futile?

The combination of misdirection, false statements, exaggerations, misplaced emphasis, character attacks, slander, lies, and too little time to research all of the above for anyone but political obsessives (like myself) makes an intelligent vote a somewhat elusive outcome in what passes for our modern political campaigning.

That said, I had an opportunity this past Saturday to participate in a civil, disciplined, even enlightened political process that just might serve as an antidote to the modern campaign.

This past Saturday, two seasoned political journalists asked each of our partisan gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Edward Gillespie, who they are, why they are running, and what hopes they may harbor for the Commonwealth if elected this November.

Among the “hard questions” posed, Dale Peskin asked Mr. Gillespie about his “attack ad” charging that Mr. Northam was indifferent to MS 13 gang crime, that he’d release gang members to the streets, and that he favored “sanctuary cities.”  No matter that there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia, that Mr. Northam opposes the creation of any, and that Mr. Northam supports prosecuting any and all crime, whether it’s the MS-13 gang or any other kind.  Mr. Northam said the ad was “despicable and inaccurate” and nothing less than “fear mongering.”  Later that day Mr. Gillespie campaigned with Mr. Trump’s Vice President.  Mr. Northam compared how Mr. Trump campaigned last year with how Mr. Gillespie was campaigning this year. Continue reading →

Humpty Dumpty

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humpt_dumpty_starsSo can we put the nation back together again?

Truth be told, perhaps we cannot.

We will be reviewing in the years ahead, the price to our Republic of suffering through a national conversation conducted at the level of a badly cast reality show, when we seemingly lost sight of our shared humanity, endured false aspersions, half-truths, lies, pejorative nick names, in defiance of previously respected norms set by our constitution, statute, case law, tradition, protocol, ritual, and common sense, in other words, the elaborate social contract we’ve negotiated for generations by which our citizens agreed how we could function as a collaborative and peaceful society.

We had one candidate who believed that lies were the coin of the realm and that facts didn’t matter because he expected too few would bother to check or care to find out what was the truth.

Aristotle wrote politics is the highest calling as it has the most pervasive influence on any society.  That was hard to conclude from this year’s food fight.

For starters, if we can’t agree that facts matter, if everyone can choose their own truth, then how are we to inform our judgement about our representatives and the public policy we seek to have them enact or execute.

Aristotle’s second book of Rhetoric states that we are persuaded by emotions and the best way to make an argument is to manipulate the fact finder or voter by moving them to anger, sympathy, envy, love and adoration, as suits the cause one espouses.  Is that what we’ve been doing?  Well, we need more reason, logic and truth than we’ve had.

We call our phone an I-phone, our music I-tunes, our tablets I-pads, and there’s also the I-pod.

Is there any room for an “US” in I?

What we’ve lost this political season is a focus on really important matters that affect us all.

Are we going to continuing compromising our domestic agenda by our urge to rule the world?

When are we going to wrap our arms around the terror of nuclear annihilation?  Can’t we see that there are so many of us compromising the limited resources of our struggling planet, and that we’d better do better than we have?

What are we going doing about a crumbling infrastructure?  What are we going to do to share the wealth fairly?  When are we going to decide that, if we have shifting job opportunities, that we should train those hurt by shifting markets who can’t otherwise adjust themselves?

When and how are we going to remove the obstructions to education for our children and young adults, you know, the high cost of learning and the high interest on student loans?

When are we going to insist that the cost of prescriptions be reasonable, that health care be universal, and especially so for the underprivileged and fragile members of our society?

So many invoke our founding documents but recoil from immigrants and equal rights for all – isn’t it about time we got this right – or returned that maiden lady to France – if we can’t or won’t guarantee liberty for all?

Instead of scratching our collective heads about the new math, let’s embrace innovation and undertake a great challenge to bring the nation together in a positive way, instead of like some dysfunctioning domestic relations disaster.

What are we going to do about the fact that our saged are living longer, what should we do about their retirement, about the contributions they still have to make that society resists because of the oft-ignored bias against our older Americans?

The American brand of liberty, freedom and success has suffered around the world with this disastrous presidential season.

So the question is, can we put the nation back together again?

We can but we have to do this together.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A nation that expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never was and never will be.”

It’s time for us to smarten up – if we can.

Political Magic

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magiccardsNow you see it. Now you don’t.

Since I was a kid, I’ve loved magic, learned and performed tricks with cards, coins, magnets, (foam rubber) rabbits, large silvery clanging rings, false bottom boxes, ropes, and guillotine-like finger “slicers.” I found Harry Houdini mesmerizing, and I still love going to a good old fashioned magic show – as I did the other day to watch a self-described “Hogwarts graduate,” Michael Barron, who does “magic tricks for a living.”

We know that magic is an illusion, that the finger sliced off when the blade falls will be restored, yet we scream, for our collective mind suspends its disbelief, wanting to believe we’ve observed a magical singularity defying all past experience and common sense.

We play the fool, indeed we crave to be deceived, so we may puzzle, “how do you suppose he fooled us?”

How is this like politics?

It’s similar but not so harmless.

In politics, we often have the oleaginous con, the pol who does not perform as well as a tyro carney magician, he may even appear to be a clumsy oaf, stumbling to speak, having nary an original thought, a slender resume to fill the elective post he seeks, but he searches cleverly, like a political dowser might, to find the wellspring of our hope or fear that he promises to satisfy – while our jimminy cricket whispers, “you know, he can’t possibly do that.”

You’ve heard it this silly season.

One says – Walls will go up I tell you.

Another – Opportunity will rise – beyond your wildest dreams.

There’s a high price we pay for being suckered by such political misdirection. Continue reading →

The desperate candidates – and their party

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gopPresDebateWhen did the Republican presidential primary become a Bravo Reality TV series – “the Desperate Candidates?”

We have trash talk from a bombastic billionaire developer, Donald Trump, putting down the “Republican Establishment,” and those, who he convincingly says, are his “establishment” competitors.

In the latest round of churlish misconduct, Trump blasted one opponent based on his height (“little Marco”), countered by the charge that Trump was a crook (“con man”) according to Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, prompting Trump to come back on Senator Cruz (“lying Ted”), and Senator Rubio’s toe-curling grammar school innuendoes followed, knocking Trump’s face, hair and, the most controversial, Trump’s sexual prowess (“small hands”), causing Trump to offer a national on-air description of his private body parts (“no problem there”).

In Loudoun County, despite Senator Rubio’s “below the belt” rhetoric, he was enthusiastically invited to Patrick Henry College to rally his true believers at a school founded “to impact the world ‘for Christ and for Liberty.’”

At the rally, Senator Rubio promised to compromise the medical care anyone was receiving under the Affordable Care Act, to step up the war on terror, to keep Guantanamo open and to “find out everything they [the prisoners there] know,” without saying precisely how he’d make that happen within the law and “as a devout Christian.” Congresswoman Barbara Comstock touted Rubio as “the most conversant on all of the top issues of the day.”

The Republican presidential candidates, including those deeply mired in this dehumanizing dialogue, undeservedly affect a moral superiority as compared with Trump. Continue reading →

Begin the world over again

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mlkMarchingTom Paine wrote that our new nation had the opportunity “to begin the world over again.”

This election year, voters seem to want to do just that – but the ratio of incomprehensible noise to common sense has been five to one.

The Reverend Martin Luther King said, “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call upon our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.”

When marchers walked on Martin Luther King’s Day from the court house to the school house. the diverse community of warmly bundled marchers, were conscious that their only inconvenience was the wind and weather.

The march in Selma, Alabama, however, was conducted at some risk, and helped to win the voting rights legislation in 1965.

Selma succeeded because, as King described it, a “stubborn sheriff” acted so wrongly in handling that protest, he “stumbled against the future.”

The Reverend King was focused on what was just and fair, on equality, and the guide for his activism was the non-violence of Jesus and of Gandhi.

After Selma, King said that, “Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. That is what I have found in nonviolence.”

Anticipating his own death, King said in the Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, that he identified with those who were poor and hungry and, “[i]f it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice say, ‘Do something for others.’”

The challenge for our nation, in his mind, was human rights. Continue reading →

Dominion’s 550 mile toxic gas pipeline

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dominionpipelineWe all resent the fact that Dominion Power owns the elected officials and pols in both parties in the Commonwealth of Virginia, rather than having our elected “representatives” represent “our” interests.

Dominion Power dictates legislation that favors its unrestrained exploitation of our natural resources in derogation of our individual rights and liberties.

Only days ago, our leaders in both parties told us that it was a good deal for us to have a floor on electricity rates and to exempt Dominion from regulatory oversight for seven years.

Last year, the General Assembly gave Dominion a $400 million corporate welfare write-off for a plant that Dominion may never build.

A particularly obvious example of personal excess is a million dollar state grant to Dominion’s CEO, Thomas Farell, to make a civil war movie.

Unsurprisingly, Dominion has no hesitation about planning a 550 mile 42-inch wide pipeline, called the Atlantic Pipeline, from Harrison County, WV, through Virginia, and on to North Carolina, full of fracked and toxic liquid natural gas, 1.5 billion cubic feet a day, at a pressure of 1,440 psig, extracted from the Marcellus shale fields in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

In order to build this pipeline, Dominion shall destroy swaths of forests and private property, compromise wildlife and historic venues, and, when they’re done, if we don’t stop this juggernaut now, there will be toxic liquid natural gas (LNG) spills and leaks. Continue reading →

St. James’ movie on political $ prompts debate

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pay2playSt. James UCC advertised that they were convening a “non-partisan” viewing of a movie at 7 PM last Tuesday to consider how campaign finance compromises democracy and representative government.

David Weintraub said, “Wherever you are on the political spectrum there seems to be pretty broad agreement that the way campaigning is done is negative, distasteful and drives people away from engagement.”

David publicized the movie, “Pay2Play,” among other ways, on Facebook, at Lovettsville 20180.

Frank McDonough led the charge, however, posting an FB dissent, testing how “broad” the agreement actually was about the perils of campaign finance, claiming the advertised movie was too liberal, and attacked David, saying: “I have followed your editorials in many local papers for a few years. I am reasonably sure that I have never agreed with any of them.”

Warner Workman, Jr., said, “I would much rather be lied to a[nd] feel good than hear the truth.”

Frank said, “As far as your Pastor [Don Prange] I have never met him, either but imagine my surprise when my family in Charleston WV called to tell me that he had been arrested there at a UMW rally.”

David responded, “I am very proud of my pastor. It’s easy enough to sit in church and wring our hands and say ‘Isn’t it awful how those people are treated?’  To put your own body on the line, as in the very robust Christian tradition of the civil rights movement, back to Abolition and beyond, takes courage and commitment to the life and teachings of Jesus.” Continue reading →

Smaller is better – for learning

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smallschoolWho really thinks that large factory size schools where principals and teachers carry walkie-talkies to manage the place are better than small schools with fewer students in each class room?

If you’ve ever taught a class, or attended one, you know you can give or get more attention in a smaller class, and it’s hard for any son or daughter to get lost or hide from the teacher’s attention when the class is smaller.

We all know what drives the super-sized school is the uncontrolled residential development that, these days, burdens all manner of resources including whether our aquifers can continue to supply enough water for all the wells that will be necessary to serve the residential deluge as yet unbuilt.

We have folk, mostly elected, who rattle the budgetary sabre, threatening to close the small legacy schools, running them down, slandering them – in my opinion.

It’s a test of political wills, to see if the political class can cauterize the right-minded impulse of communities and parents who prefer that small schools educate our young.

What’s the proof that small schools are better? Continue reading →

Relentless fundraising spam

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sendMoney

I’m so fed up with countless Dem fundraising emails asking for money to fund a non-existent impeachment fight – especially given that the U.S. House Judiciary Chairman, Bob Goodlatte, who heads the House Committee that would have to pass on any impeachment resolution, said there is none under consideration nor contemplated; in agreement, we have House Speaker John Boehner who heads the Republican Caucus saying the same thing.

Yet we folk who have been identified as partisans (or even possible contributors) are receiving gigabytes of sky-is-falling e-alerts that, we’re told, just have to be answered immediately to fund the defense of the impeachment that never was or will be, concluding with the imperative direction – you’d better “donate” and “now.”

I’m no less angry at the Rs for the BS law suit against the President they’re pushing that has no legal legs, prosecuted with faux outrage at the discretion they’ve so recently “discovered” the President has to execute the laws of the land. 

Continue reading →

The scent of reform

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Lawrence Gaughan, 5th District Congressional Candidate (photo by John P. Flannery)

Lawrence Gaughan, 5th District Congressional Candidate (photo by John P. Flannery)

Lawrence Gaughan, 47, his family name pronounced “Gone,” as in “Gone with the Wind,” has launched a special political campaign in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District as the Democratic nominee.

“This is the district,” Lawrence says, “where it all began,” a large district from Fauquier in the North to Danville, where the nation was conceived, declared independent of Great Britain, given birth when the constitution was ratified, and re-born at Appomattox after our civil war.

In a year with few rhetorical campaign excursions beyond the same-old wedge issues that manipulate voters at the polls in cookie cutter campaigns, Lawrence is staking out some plain talking common sense basics to get the nation going again, focusing on governing our nation, instead of tearing it apart.

Continue reading →