Our average Augusta County reader: not offended by the president posting videos of the Obamas as apes, Ben Cline calling a Senate Democratic leader a “clown,” but, man, call one of their favorites a “dimwit” for suggesting that the county would be better off becoming a part of West Virginia, and them’s fighting words.
“In spite of your thoughts about Mr. Shull’s comments at that meeting, you don’t do yourself any favors by the name calling and belittling. I thought you were better than that. That was disappointing to read and my opinion not journalism. In sports terms; just ‘bush league.’ Hoping you will take this to heart and never repeat,” a guy by the name of Bill Meade wrote to me last night.
The source of the butthurt for Mr. Meade: my column calling out Michael Shull, a member of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors, for his dumb comments defending his partisan pushback to the April 21 redistricting referendum, which included the inane suggestion that Richmond could just “redistrict the whole western part” of the state “and put us in West Virginia,” for all he cares.
ICYMI
I reported on the just plain silliness of the idea last night, and here, I’ll add some context – that this isn’t exactly a new dumb idea from the MAGA far, far right in our part of the state, which has been advocating for a Vexit for several years now.
Most recently, we had the Brooklyn-born, New Jersey-bred Rutgers alum serving as the governor of West Virginia offering an olive branch and a bucket of sweet, clean coal to western Virginia counties after the November state elections, which saw a Democrat sweep, by landslide margins.
“Don’t wait for the high taxes to heavy regulations to come, now is your chance to escape to wild and wonderful West Virginia,” was the post-election message from the aforementioned West Virginia governor, Patrick Morrissey, who, it’s worth noting, only moved to West Virginia, and Harpers Ferry – barely inside the border – at that, when he was 39 years old.
ICYMI
This Patrick Morrissey is as West Virginia as Tony Soprano, with the added touch that, before he got into elected politics, he made his living as a pharmaceutical lobbyist, and now runs a state set backwards a generation by the opioid crisis that he made gobs of money advocating for.
Can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Why this would be a bad idea for the likes of Augusta County: economics.
The latest data has median household income up in Fairfax County at $150,993, whereas here in Augusta County, we’re at $80,543.
Median household income over in wild, wonderful West Virginia: $57,917.
McDowell County, down on the other side of the border from Tazewell, which has been in the news here in Virginia lately, has a median household income at $29,980.
Ouch.
So, let’s say we decide to up and secede from Virginia to hitch our wagon to West Virginia: the second we do so, we become their Fairfax County, paying more than our fair share of state taxes to our poorer neighbors, as opposed to being the ones who get subsidies from the folks to our north and east.
As it stands now, Northern Virginia subsidizes our roads, our schools.
We go from that to, we’d be paying for roads and schools and other state services for other folks, meaning, you guessed it, our local taxes either have to go up to account for what we’re not only losing from Northern Virginia, but what we’re sending towards folks out west, or, we just make do with roads crumbling and schools not able to afford to pay the teachers.
All of that for, what, exactly?
Oh, yeah, because, per Michael Shull, Richmond is trying to “suppress our vote in Augusta County, because you’ll have somebody representing you outside of the county that don’t know anything about the people here.”
Having three Members of Congress representing the county instead of one is a bad thing, following this reasoning, which Shull backed up by saying that Richmond is trying to “suppress our vote in Augusta County, because you’ll have somebody representing you outside of the county that don’t know anything about the people here.”
Ben Cline is the current single congressman representing Augusta County in the U.S. House of Representatives; Cline lives in Botetourt County.
Which is “outside of the county,” to borrow from Shull’s phrasing.
Cline’s home address in Fincastle is 78.0 miles from the Augusta County Government Center, per Google Maps.
Back to my sin here, in the eyes of Bill Meade: in my column on the topic, I referred to Shull as being “dimwitted,” “obviously not the brightest star in the constellation” and, the kicker, “bird-brained.”
Shudder!
I get these kinds of email complaints from people who write to complain about my characterizations of MAGAs in public office all the time – not my first rodeo.
The standard response:
“Send me copies of your emails to Mr. Trump noting your concerns about the same.”
I sent this note to Mr. Meade, who seemed taken aback at the suggestion
“Mr. Trump? How did he enter this? FYI, I was not a Trump voter or wear a MAGA hat if that’s where you were going with that?”
I need to note here: they all say that.
Nobody, in the course of years of these kinds of interactions, has ever copped to being a Trump voter, fan, supporter, MAGA hat-owner.
They’re all middle-of-the-road, vote-for-the-candidate-not-the-party types.
It’s just a coincidence that they only write to defend Trump and the MAGAs.
I raised this issue with Mr. Meade, asking him, again, if he’d ever written to Trump or Ben Cline to raise issue with their language referencing people like me as the enemy, and worse
“The president and congressmen can insult people to the end of the day,” I wrote back, “but when people who have had it with the destruction they’ve wreaked on our country the past 10 years respond in kind, we’re the bad guys.
“If I’m going to be held to a higher standard by somebody, I expect that somebody to also hold others to that same standard.
“I get emails like this one frequently enough that I’m damn tired of it.
“These emails, to borrow a term, are bush-league.
“The Trump regime is killing people on the streets, but, tsk tsk, I called a local supervisor a dimwit.
“Good heavens!”
“Oh well, I tried. Your website says to contact you, so I did,” Meade wrote me back. “If you don’t want responses back, don’t invite them. I was hoping it would help, and no, my email was not bush league, it was written in a hope of civility. Sorry I bothered to write back.”
So, this guy wrote to me to complain about me insulting a local leader, and in so doing, derided my writing as “not journalism” and “bush league,” but he did so in “a hope of civility.”
You can’t make this utter lack of self-awareness up, peeps.
Support AFP
Share
Chris Graham
