Winners and Losers: June 24, 2008

Compiled by Chris Graham
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WINNER: Waynesboro Mayor Tom Reynolds goes out on a high note

Nice tribute from Waynesboro City Council members to the outgoing mayor, Tom Reynolds, last night.

Big ups to Tim Williams for sharing a personal story that broke through the tensions that we’ve been feeling here in the ‘Boro in recent weeks.

Big ups to Reynolds as well. It had to be tempting to want to say something when Frank Lucente chimed in with a tepid statement about the contentiousness being over when the meetings were over, considering.

LOSERS: Frank Lucente, Tim Williams and Bruce Allen

And this time not through their own doing. That nonsensical letter to the editor from Stewart Hall in today’s News Virginian has them on the defensive again. And why? Stew, things had died down after the PR disaster that was the firing of Doug Walker.

It’s called message discipline, and obviously these guys have never heard of it.

LOSERS: Anti-taxers have their day in Richmond

The last Brooks Brothers riot gave us George W. Bush as our president. Now they want us to pay tolls on interstates so that they can go back and tell Grover Norquist that we didn’t raise taxes.
Seriously, get a job, get a life, whatever.

TODAY’S HOT OR NOT: Scott McClellan’s What Happened

I’m finishing it up now, and let me say, good read. McClellan was put through the ringer by the right for a couple of the more controversial passages in the book (related to the president’s lack of candor about past drug use and what might or might not have happened in a closed-door meeting between Plame affair principals Karl Rove and Scooter Libby), but what the right should have been upset about is McClellan’s blunt assessment of the Bush administration’s failures and how they came to be. Too often these kinds of books end up being justification-fests that offer little of real value to the public discourse. McClellan may never work in GOP politics again – OK, he definitely will never work in GOP politics again – but he has done his country a great service with this book.