Nonpartisan

[mmcirvin]

I take back most of my disagreement with Reid Stott. Judging from the first part of his essay, when he says "nonpartisan" he still means it literally, instead of the usual modern meaning of "stop criticizing politician X", which has so corrupted the term that I have a hard time taking it at face value. I also have doubts about Ray Nagin's sainthood, and it's only if you see the whole thing as a zero-sum Republicans vs. Democrats game that picking on Nagin really exonerates Bush (it seems pretty negative-sum to me).

But it's really, really hard to be nonpartisan when criticizing the federal government if one party controls everything. You have to go looking for some Democrats to criticize somewhere else to get that nonpartisan glow. Maybe I can rent myself out as a token Democrat to criticize when you want to be nonpartisan and are absolutely at wit's end. If we lose a few more thousand people because of federal incompetence, I can go out and say something offensive on the teevee for a reasonable fee while waving around my motor-voter form from the RMV with the party check box on it.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

An excellent question, and the answer is "sometimes, sometimes not". One of the things that Nagin did have to deal with was that the city didn't have the money to do what it needed to do.

Reid's pretty much recanted his implication of a politics-free interval; he says it was just his way of hawking for donations, which is fine with me.