My favorite Virginia political columnist, Ed Lynch, has a piece on the Roanoke Times site about Sen. Russ Potts’ entrance into the governor’s race. I describe him as my “favorite” because reading his columns makes me feel smart. I’m not as good as I’d like to be at dissecting writing, pulling it apart into its component pieces, detecting inconsistencies, and rebutting the thesis. But Lynch’s columns are just so terrible that I feel like a genius reading them. (See my dissection of his October column about Sen. Creigh Deeds, or his December column, where he invents a wholly-new, completely fictitious definition of “conception,” joining the ranks of Del. Bob Marshall and Del. Dick Black in the process.)
This time around, Lynch is pontificating on Potts and on the tremendous unity among Virginia Republicans. Apparently not aware that the Potts-hurts-Kaine bubble was popped before it was even inflated, he moves on to declare how totally, utterly unified that the Republican Party is, dismissing the whole of the Senate as a “crumbling bastion of moderate Republicanism.” Which is funny, because if the party is so unified, why does he devote four paragraphs to attacking his fellow Republicans?
The piece doesn’t deserve a proper analysis, because it’s so shallow, but suffice it to say that I’m thrilled to see Lynch hopping on the bandwagon, playing right into Democrats’ hands by reinforcing the “teeny-tiny tent” mentality that has doomed the RPV to short-term irrelevance.
Keep talkin’, Ed. Tim Kaine needs your support!
Waldo, can I just say that I LOVE your mother??? I followed your link to your discussion of the idiotic column on conception, and I was so impressed with your mother’s mention of the etymology of “conception”. This is really helpful information given the debates this year about the Birth Control Protection Act.
Since my favorite undergraduate courses were two semesters of historical linguistics, I’m envious of you having a mom who’s not only so supportive of your political efforts, but who can drop on-topic etymology into comments on your pieces. You have the coolest mom on the VA Dem blogosphere block! :-)