Words cannot adequately display how disgusted I am with Virginia Delegates Bob Marshall and Dick Black. I just saw a commercial on Newschannel8 paid for by the Delegate Black campaign where he took credit for road improvements that he voted against. This is exactly the same pattern the Delegate Marshall campaign has taken; taking credit in his mailed flyers for road improvements he voted against! The sad truth is that both campaigns know that people are unlikely to look up their public legislature records, which make it clear exactly what this pair of cretins have been working on, and it certainly is not improving our roads nor public safety. Please look for yourselves:Marshall’s Legislation
Thomas Frank writes it so eloquently in his book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” when he writes:
American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and lassez-faire capitolism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust — which forces they praise in the most exalted terms.
Pages later, from the same source:
Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse. It invites us all to join in, to lay doen our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renouce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.
On the surface it appears that this all has nothing to do with the local battle between Marshall/Black/Craddock (with their neo-conservative supporters) and Roemmelt/Poisson (with most rational and aware voters); but it is exactly that same sort of self-righteous blindness that brought neo-cons to power in Kansas that we are seeing here in Virginia. My hope is that the difference is that Virginia, with it’s proximity to other, more advanced public forums (like West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC) will be reminded of those connections that the rest of the world holds as self-evident: that Black and Marshall get elected every two years based on their anti-abortion stands, and that every term in office they fleece middle-class Virginians of more and more of those same things we all love (slow, managed growth; local small businesses; communities that care about their members).
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