GOP, Cat Stranglers, Tilting Djou
Wednesday - September 06, 2006
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Del.icio.usI think I often get down on Republicans for no reason other than their current calamity in the White House.
Maybe that’s reason enough if you grew up under Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and were blessed to have missed Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
Now I’ve been sent this quote from Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion:
“I recall having once referred to Republicans as hairy-backed swamp developers, fundamentalist bullies, freelance racists, hobby cops, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, marsupial moms, aluminum-siding salesmen, misanthropic frat boys, ninja ditto-heads, shrieking midgets, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, pill-pushers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, the grand pooh-bahs of Percodan, mouth-breathers, testosterone junkies and brownshirts in pin-stripes.
“I look at those words now, and ‘cat stranglers’ seems excessive to me. The number of cat stranglers in the ranks of the Republican Party is surely low, and that reference was hurtful to Republicans and to cat owners.”
It is surely not excessive or hurtful for me to ask why We The People are in the business of leasing residential cottages to private citizens inside Kokee State Park on Kauai. But we are and now that their leases are up they want us to pay them for improvements they’ve made. When your house lease was up did Kamehameha Schools (Bishop Estate) pay you for that new kitchen or roof you put in at Punaluu or Kahala?
So why don’t we simply evict those cabin holders and then privatize the operation of Kokee and most other Hawaii parks? Privatizing worked like a charm at Malaekahana, but the city and state have dragged butt since that experiment. It seems to be a UPW-HGEA hangup. Lots of union people would have to be privatized, too.
Can’t blame that on the Republicans, can I?
Charles Djou is the knight errant of the GOP on the City Council, but Sir Charles’s escutcheon has been tarnished by his own misadventure to rescue a Republican damsel alleging to be in distress but in fact just missing out on a buck.
Djou decided to joust against Mayor Mufi Hannemann and rail mass transit (Djou opposes the tax for it) in the name of the GOP’s Lady Kitty Lagareta, who was sorely miffed that her PR company did not get work with the transit-study engineers while a Hannemann supporter did.
But the federal inspector says Djou’s derailing effort is “totally without merit.”
‘Tis not easy to live as knight errant, Sir Charles. You surely know about Lancelot and Mordred. Sir Kay was branded a braggart and fool. Sir Ivain lost his wits. Sir Tristan had a very unhappy married life. Sir Morholt was slain by Tristan. Sir Palemedes was slain by Sir Gawain, and Sir Sagremore was cut down by Sir Mordred.
The Round Table was a preview of modern politics.
So beware, Sir Charles. Don Quixote went about tilting at windmills and made the term knight errant one of ridicule.
I thought the Advertiser‘s Aug. 27 front-page photos of a perfectly coiffed Sen. Dan Akaka and an unruly haired, balding-appearing Rep. Ed Case was very bad editorial oversight.
Akaka got a face-on shot for the profile story. Case was in profile.
I’m sure it was inadvertent, but such little things trump the image of journalistic neutrality during heated political campaigns.
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