Good Copy goes to the shire

I’ve been trying to cut down on my intake of Jeff Schapiro’s work in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and particularly of his Sunday sermons, which, often as not, are more like Rorschach tests than they are serious political opinion.

But Jeff’s recent ink blot was brought to my attention because it contains a new strain of strangeness. In his attempt to describe the sudden rough-and-tumble of the commonwealth’s attorney race in Henrico county, Jeff properly straps on the good copy helmet and dives in. But it does appear that before he made the plunge, he cinched the goggles on so tightly that they gave him visions of far-away lands, and of even more remote despots desperate to cling to power:

Geary is learning this hard truth the hard way. Like the tanks on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the county’s political establishment is massing against him. Henrico’s maximum leader, Eric Cantor, unceremoniously gave Geary the brush off. Cantor, who donated $1,000 to Geary and whose former aide is running the Geary campaign, took a brief break from slapping around President Barack Obama to smack down the candidate, describing the controversy engulfing him as “very troubling.” Well-paid campaign operatives who giddily live by the words of Shakespeare — “let slip the dogs of war” — will soon be nipping at Geary’s heels.

So many mixed and muddled metaphors. One would have thought, what with all the talk of hobbits lately, that Jeff would have latched on to the much richer metaphor of Henrico (one of Virginia’s eight original shires) as Tolkien’s “Shire” under the cruel thumb of Sharkey. Oh, the fun he could have had with that one…

What of the substance of Jeff’s sermon? He’s trying, desperately, to make what is a tempest in a teapot into the Teapot Dome Scandal. Loosen the goggles a notch, Jeff, and enjoy the fact that the one-party shire is finally going to have a competitive race for one of its more important offices.

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About the author

Norman Leahy

Norm Leahy has written about Virginia and national politics online since 2002, beginning with One Man's Trash (OMT), and continuing through Bacon's Rebellion (both the blog and the e-zine), Sic Semper Tyrannis, NBC12's Decision Virginia, Richmond.com and Tertium Quids. He is the chief blogger at "The Score" and a producer of "The Score" radio show as well as being a Washington Examiner contributor.