With Allies Like These...

The newish yet mostly reliable Washington Examiner has this to say today about Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis's opposition to a re-naming Washington DC's 16th Street after Ronald Reagan:

Though the [District] has several Republican allies on Capitol Hill, one man more than any other stands in the way of GOP tinkering with local laws and policies - Rep. Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia. The moderate Republican's position as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee has become a vital appointment for the District of Columbia.

That's an absurd misreading of reality. It's not that Davis sticks up for the several hundred-thousand District residents for whom taxatation without representation is both a reality and a license plate slogan, it's that Davis has a strong aversion to anyone wielding power over the unwashed masses who is not specifically Tom Davis.

Take his fear of "urban" people moving from the District to his leafy environs, or his threats against lefty financier and drug-war opponent George Soros, who has joined a group hoping to buy the Washington National baseball team, or his obsession with the particular particulates appearing in the piss of ball players -- some of whom now swing a bat here in the nation's capital. (Or, as the consistent-yet-ignorant folks at Starbuck's Starbucks choose to write it sans apostrophe: "The Nations Capital.")

If, as the Examiner posits, an ally to the District's people is someone who opposes the interests of this unrepresented constituency 99% of the time and egotistically sides with them on matters of trifling importance as a means of showing his peers in the House just how big his cock is -- like this courageous stand against changing the name of a few street signs -- well then the interests of people living in DC truly aren't being represented in Congress. Which, sadly, is my point.