More empty promises

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
More empty promises				March 8, 2008

Sen. Tommy Norment is in a pickle.

He’s also now the minority leader in the state Senate. That, combined with the fact that the Senate Democrats are calling him an “obstructionist” has left in his mouth a vinegary taste that’s associated with those cukes at the bottom of the barrel.

So flummoxed was Norment last week during an especially gruesome discussion of the budget that he vowed to use any Machiavellian trick necessary to ensure that the Senate would soon return to its more civil majority of 21 Republicans. Evidently the Republicans are more civil about ramrodding legislation through by stomping on Democrats than Democrats are when the blow off Republicans.

Norment’s power fantasies aside, the question most voters are asking themselves now is whether it makes a hoot’s worth of difference who’s running the political store.

Despite the fact that the General Assembly knew there was immense dissatisfaction with the two newly established regional transportation boards and the plethora of fees and taxes over which they would preside, the legislature decided to plop its rump on its hands and let that botched piece of vulture-driven legislation sail on without a peep.

It wasn’t until the Virginia Supreme Court took a look at this Platonic form of unconstitutional quackery and threw up its collective hands in utter disbelief that our attorney general, who sanctioned the bill, and the legislators who passed it realized that they simply could no longer dream up such bunkum on the basis of divination and astrological confluences.

Virginians also had every right to believe that, as the result of the massacre at Virginia Tech, the legislature might delve into its belly and find the guts to pass some meaningful gun control legislation. Yet, while they willingly swam around in the safer waters of mental health, their response to an overwhelming appeal for restrictions on private sellers at gun shows was yet another sop to the NRA. They passed a bill that would allow packers of concealed guns to carry those weapons in restaurants and bars.

The only caveat was that gun toters had to tell a waitress that they were carrying heat, and, though in a bar, that they wouldn’t drink. Uh-huh.

Gov. Kaine has rightfully vetoed that bit of bilge.

The great problem we face is that political Machiavellianism has become not just a state, but a national disease. Whether it be the Virginia General Assembly or the United States Senate and House of Representatives, the fact is that all but a very few of those involved in the eroticism of power are but fetuses in the womb of the entrenched special interests and corporations who dangle money for suckling in front of their newborns’ campaigns.

What the people want and think they’re getting when they transfer power to one party or another and what they actually get are two very different things.

How many of us believed the Democratic swamis who told us that, if we elected them to the Senate and House, they would get us out of Iraq?

Not only are we not out of Iraq, but both legislative bodies continue to wilt before Bush budgets and para-budgets that have to date tossed over $2 trillion down the sewers of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Iranian president Ahmadinejad was welcomed in Baghdad as a political hero-brother, while President Bush slinks in and out of the country like some Archie Bunker adrift in Harlem. But we’re making progress.

In the present never-ending campaign for the presidency, all kinds of promises that will never be kept are floating around like bobbers at a fish-catching contest.

Hours and hours of debates have been consumed by discussions of universal health care and, once again, getting out of Iraq.

But there will be no universal health care in this country as long as pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and others with a vested interest in making loot from disease remain the puppeteers they always have been and continue to pull their Machiavellian strings. It simply won’t happen.

Why do you suppose that, after 19 years, the massacre of the coast of Alaska by the Exxon Valdez oil spill has still not resulted in the payment of assessed punitive damages of $2.5 billion to 32,000 fishermen and others whose livelihood was destroyed by the disaster? Ask those good Alaskan complainants still alive who’s really running the country.

As for Iraq, I suspect that Sen. John McCain was the only candidate telling the truth when he speculated that we’d be in that quagmire for another 100 years.

In the end, voting for any candidate on the basis of his or her promises is about as futile and meaningless as voting in James City County for supervisors who pledge to limit growth.

The fact is that the citizens of this country have seen their constitutional right to ballot box power decimated and annulled. Our republic is now economically owned by China and, as President Eisenhower warned in the1950s, politically controlled by the Pentagon and corporate bottom lines. And that won’t change if Sen. Norment and Machiavelli succeed in taking back the Virginia Senate.