The Washington Post gave front page coverage Sunday to a Republican candidate for the Fairfax County Board. Unfortunately, in the process, the WaPo boosted this candidate's phony message that her campaign is about adding more "diversity" to the County Board.
As I reported on RK two months ago, Vellie Dietrich-Hall, a Filipino-American, is challenging Penny Gross as Supervisor for the County's Mason District. But the details that the WaPo left for the end of the article show that Ms. Hall, under the guise of "diversity", actually represents the farthest right-wing of the GOP. Like those McDonald's commercials that show the black, Asian and white kids sharing their burgers, this is diversity for marketing purposes only - in order to bolster the power of the same white-bread, good ol' boy, born-again elites who are used to running the show.
Ms. Hall is best known as one of the minorities that George Allen dragged out on stage with him to try to gain some political cover after his infamous "macaca" video.
After striking it rich as a defense contractor, Ms. Hall also served on Bush's Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a thinly-veiled attempt to convert more Asians to Republicanism.
The WaPo story adds an even more interesting wrinkle in revealing that Hall named her daughter "Ayn" after the fanatical right-wing author Ayn Rand. Rand is best known for her epic novel "Atlas Shrugged", in which the robber barons of the world "go on strike" to protest against governments having the nerve to tax and regulate their corporations rather than letting them run roughshod over the earth, their customers and their employees.
IMHO, anyone who shares Rand's proto-fascist vision - in which all right-wing capitalists are beautiful, dashing, heroic figures, and all moderates and progressives are spineless, sniveling weasels - should be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible. This is exactly the kind of "diversity" we'd be better off without.
It's one thing to bash an Allen fan (let's see somebody named Jim Webb voted for some guy named George Allen a few years back as I recall) .... but the leap into a Rand Rant puzzles me.
Anyone here or particularly at Daily Kos (the founder) who has libertarian views should take note of this hog fat baloney - PROTO FACIST - that's your fiction Kindler.
I'll take a strong an independent Rand (woman) over a government loving socialist (feminazis come to mind) any day. Ayn Rand .... a woman who pioneered individualism, liberty and consequently feminism, at a time when real facism and communism was the cause celeb of her day. Bash Ms. Hall all you want though it seems a bit trite.
Leave Ayn Rand out of it ...... she richly deserves her place on a U.S. Postage stamp!!!
I devoured Atlas Shrugged in full some years back and did find it a very interesting read. But ultimately I think that Rand's treatment of capitalism as an infallible god rather than a mere economic system is a dangerous thing that has fueled much of the craziness of the right wing revolution of the last few decades.
This is the kind of ideological extremism that brings great nations to destruction when, for example, they have to deny the overwhelming existence of a scientific phenomenon like global warming rather than taking any government action of any consequence that might cost some business a few bucks. Rand's stick figures of heroic capitalists vs. spineless progressives and governments was classic black-and-white propaganda.
Real life has grey areas, and we need leaders who understand that.