Remember Courtland Milloy, the WashPo metro columnist who celebrated Mayor Adrian Fenty's education-reform-croaking defeat at the polls this week by going postal on the "myopic little twits" from the scarequoteworthy "creative class" who are ruining the nation's capital with their Tweeting and their Michelle Rhee-loving and their "chic new eateries"? Guess where this intolerant, economically illiterate D.C. nationalist lives?
Go ahead and tell me how terrible it is that an anti-masturbation sub-Palin has an outside chance of being one of the few of the 100 senators who you could pick out in a police lineup. I will counter with a less-sexy story about how, in the city where I choose to live, where I pay hefty local taxes, where I have sincere hopes about placing my daughter in a public school system (as Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee do, but Barack Obama does not), where I have witnessed stunning changes for the better in just two years of interacting with the local elementary school, one of the country's foulest and most powerful special interests, the overwhelmingly Democratic Party-financing American Federation of Teachers, just spent $1 million large to make sure that the last glimmer of reform for this famously bottom-of-the-barrel school district gets snuffed out, in a wave of anti-Stuff White People Like spite.
This is your mainstream Democratic Party, people. It knows how to speak in complete sentences, it knows how to masturbate, and it knows how to destroy expensive education systems. I hope you fucking enjoy it.
UPDATE: Adam Serwer, The American Prospect's "triple threat," whose work people keep telling me I should like, reacts to this post with a pungent blast of self-superior incomprehension:
It's kind of funny to watch Tea Party boosters descend into a furious rage over signs of an inverse sense of racial entitlement among some political figures in Washington, D.C. […]
Truly, is there a man life has wronged more deeply than Welch? Last time I checked, Fenty and Rhee were Democrats, and Democratic President Barack Obama's administration had just given them $75 million in federal money to implement their agenda. But whatever, political speech is for independently wealthy types who can fund magazines and think tanks, not for school teachers organizing on behalf of their own interests. I suppose I hope that in addition to being familiar with masturbation, basic grammar and how to destroy education in America, the foul Democratic Party also knows how to use Google.
Milloy's column, with its rage against professional elites disdaining the groundlings, followed the basic right-wing script, except its racial resentment was directed at whites rather than blacks, which is why it made Welch and any number of other D.C.-based white folks on the right so angry.
Yes, Adam, there are people whose lives have been much, much more wronged than my own (which, in the event, I wasn't complaining about). You can see them in the video above. I'm sure your white-boy mirth and appreciation of union rights will come as welcome consolation to the fact that their children are trapped.
