Virginianapoliticians say the darndest things two

I've signed up for e-mail alerts from the Al Weed campaign. They gave me a heads up to a few choice things Virgil Goode had to say for himself at a recent candidate forum. According to the Daily Progress, this is how Virgil Goode explained his illegal campaign contributions, "He said I got nearly $100,000 in illegal contributions. Not so. It was about $46,000 that was straw contributions..."

The subject/verb agreement aside ("was" + "contributions"), Goode is using the "I robbed the bank with a toy gun" defense. And what, praytell, is a "straw contribution?" The website doubletongued.org explains, "His solution was to have his employees and their spouses make contributions …under their own names, then reimburse them—a technique known as 'straw contributions' that is a felony under federal election law"

Hmmmm...so what Virgil Goode is telling us is that he should be our congressman one more time because he draws a careful moral line between a $46,000 felony and a $100,000 one. What about $86,754? Where does that fit into your moral calculus, honorable Mr. Goode?

Of course, all of this is compounded by the fact that the city of Martinsville, which is already taking it up the unemployment hind end, gave MZM (the felonious "straw contributor") millions of dollars to locate its defense contracting bait and switch program in their area. A dishonest program that went belly up, costing not only the good people of Martinsville money, but, as Mr. Weed points out, taking away money from properly outfitting our good soldiers in Iraq. (Anyone remember the whole, "You go to war with the army you have?") Of course, all of this is made more mind-numbingly ridiculous by the fact that it is possibly the sole responsibility of Mr. Goode to keep this kind of FUBAR garbage from happening in the first place.

However, Mr. Goode has a smart@$$ play on Mr. Weed's last name to distract us. Mr. Goode's assertion that Mr. Weed, "must be smoking something like what he’s named for," makes me feel so much better about having a representative who is either a felon or has his head so firmly up his hind end that he can't tell a snake-oil salesman from a defense contractor. Shouldn't the whole "I was too dumb to know that I was doing something unethical and illegal" defense mean that one is too dumb to be an elected representative?

However, enough about politics, Liz and I took a delightful drive down to Lynchburg to get our history on without our less than historically inclined partners. Of course, associating that fair city with Rev. Falwell et al. is a natural tendency. However, the city fathers have really cleaned up the downtown nice. They are putting up lofts in old (and by old I mean Civil War Era) warehouses along the James River. There is an excellent historical tour of the Battle of Lynchburg. We bought the CD narrated by James Wobinson (Robinson for all us Yankees who can pronounce an "R" correctly) of Virginia Tech. The Battle of Lynchburg came right on the heels of the Battle of New Market, which Jalaila and I explored over Memorial Day.

It was a perfect day to drive through Lynchburg, which has a delightful pre-Civil War city center thanks to Jubal Early's bold defense of the city. However, the CD tour took us to some wonderfully quirky historical sites, which would never remind one of religious intolerance or bigotry. For instance, we visited the Sandusky House—yes, it is actually named after the city in Ohio where its builder was held captive by the First Nations of Ohio. (Apparently his six months in captivity were so delightful he decided to name his estate after it.) The house itself was only recently purchased by a historical foundation which is slowly but surely making it into a bona fide historicalic attraction. However, a visit now teaches one much more about how the "history" itself is made.

The house itself has a sign that says "Tours: Sunday 1-4 or by chance. Knock or ring the doorbell." The curator, a delightful man named Mr. Starbuck, welcomed us inside and gave us a lovely tour, showing us archeological items that had been recently dug up—they were still inside the standard issue archeological Kroger bag—and gave us a sneak preview of footage he shot for the house film on the Battle of Lynchburg (during which the house was used as the Union headquarters).

Continuing on the tour, we visited several other interesting spots, but the best was the City Cemetary, which contained the Potters Field—the indigent cemetary, the Confederate graveyard, a train station relocated from 20 miles north timber by timber, an exhibit on 19th century underwear, an exhibit on 19th century hearses, and several historic caskets. The last stop through the park was a lily pond located across from the location of one of the few bona fide Confederate Equine Hospitals. This particular hospital did research into the Great Glanders Epizootic (as opposed to Epidemic—"demos"="people," "zoon"="animal."

All in all, I'm looking forward to coming back to Lynchburg and riding my bike on the downtown bike trail, and possibly visiting Teej's cottage out at Poplar Forest.