While UVa folks are busy bustling about investigating their dean of African-American Affairs for some vague drug dealer connection and charges filed in federal court We, The People are left wondering, just what did the man do?

We know what Dean M. Rick Turner, now on administrative leave, didn’t do. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t sell drugs. He didn’t set up secret cameras and film college students in the Cabel Hall bathrooms doing drugs.

We know that he lied to an investigator about his knowledge of a drug dealer, but we’re not sure what that means and no one will tell us. Was the drug dealer his brother? Was the drug dealer a fellow administrator? Was the dealer supplying cocaine to a secretary, marijuana to a janitor or steroids to the football team?

We know that it’s not a crime to know people who sell or do drugs. Heck, there’s a whole lot of us who have family members who fall into that category.

We know that Mr. Turner’s offense ain’t all THAT serious. If it was, he’d face serious jail time. Instead he’s been placed in a diversionary program so that, should he be square and obey the law of the pack for the next year, the charge will be forever expunged from his permanent record.

(NOTE: That treatment, and the negotiations that went into the cloak of secrecy around his involvement, should indicate that Mr. Turner is not being persecuted for his willingness to speak out on racial issues. Sure, he’s been a pain in the polite society’s neck, accusing city school officials of racism in dumping a superintendent and calling out officials on other matters, but the punishment in the case seems to meet the crime.)

So just what should Mr. Turner have done to avoid the problem in the first place? He should have followed Nancy Reagan’s advice and just said no.

If he didn’t want to squeal—where I grew up that’s not necessarily a bad thing—he could have simply said “I’m not saying anything. If you want my testimony get a subpoena and take me to the Grand Jury.” If his input was important enough, the investigator would do just that. He could have kept quiet as long as possible and society would, if needed, still have his testimony available. In addition his involvement would likely be kept quiet until a trial. Everyone would have won.

And he would be sitting in his office instead of being strangely unavailable for comment and under a cloud of suspicion.

Bob Gibson
Daily Progress political blogger

Can a political party’s weaknesses also be its strengths?

The Democratic Party of 2006 might hope so.

A party of evolution and devolution but rarely these days of revolution, the Democrats define minority in many ways.

A group of loosely knit individuals and interests, the party that once ruled Washington and Richmond is hiding its wounds and licking its chops as it eyes November.

Virginia Democrats sense they are on the road back to legislative power in a year or three but that sense of buoyancy may be more a floating back to normal levels of minority party strength than a rising tide of restoration to majority status.

The party may be capitalizing more on great Republican Party divisions than building solid majority coalitions.

Democrats may recognize that right now their greatest appeal to the average voter is the simple and mostly undeniable fact that they are not Republicans.

Majority Republicans in Richmond, like those in Washington, occasionally act like they own the place. If they break something, like a budget or a country, their cleanup skills may not be finely honed.

When things go wrong — as they have most dramatically in budget building and in nation building — the fact that they acted like they owned the place makes imperial incumbency a tougher palace in which to keep house.

Democrats remain a party of great weaknesses, great diversity and little unanimity.

The party may stand for fairness and for education as the greatest building block of human capital, yet cannot claim those often-bipartisan standards as exclusive property.

If voters are riled about immigration reform, scared about national security and indifferent to advancing or protecting gay rights, women’s rights and civil rights, Democrats face some great difficulties in building winning issue coalitions.

The party’s greatest strength this year in the few competitive contests for seats in Congress may be in building nothing bigger than a huge banner that says something like: “They messed up and we ain’t them.”

That simple standard can’t hold up for the ages, nor should it.
Parties that stand for little or nothing in particular are empty vessels lacking inspiration.

We are a harsh, harsh society. We demand our public servants eschew graft and corruption yet get our lug nuts torqued if they ignore that tidy $20 paper-clipped to our driver’s license. We make them carry guns and bend our drive shafts when they actually use them. But worst of all, we won’t let the cops have ice cream.

What’s wrong with us?

There we were, three cops, two VDOT guys, a reporter and a photographer standing on asphalt that melted like the Wicked Witch of the West in the hot, relentless, burning sun, the heat from the backed up traffic and blacktop blasting us like Satan’s Own Sauna, the sweat of our brows evaporating in the intense heat despite the oppressive humidity.

We stood as the road sank. We, the Media, waited for the road to open its gaping maw and try to swallow a few Hyundais while the officers tried to keep traffic away from impending doom and shoo away idiots in cages who insisted on cutting through the cordoned area to get to Target.

Some sales are worth dying for.

So there we are, baking in the middle of the street and wondering at what internal temperature is a human being done, when I see it shining like the Light of Liberty from the Seminole Commons shopping center: An ice cream store.

I decide to get us all an ice cream cone.

“No way!” says an officer.

“Can’t do that,” says another.

“I wish,” says the other.

“But you don’t understand,” I plead, “I’m buying. You don’t seem to grasp the enormity of that statement. I’m a tightwad, ask anyone. I’m so tight if a I get a charley horse my toes curl up and my eyes slam shut.”

“Can’t do it,” says one officer. “Do you know what kind of complaints we’d get back at the office from people who have waited for an hour in this backup only to get here and see us eating ice cream?”

“But you’re protecting them,” I insist. “You’re out here keeping them safe and losing about a quart of liquid every hour. You’re overheating. It’s a good thing you guys don’t have hair because you’d be all sweaty and nasty. Surely The Public would understand you’re just cooling off.”

“The Public would call the chief and complain,” said another officer.

“Don’t even ask,” says the VDOT guy next to me, waving me off as if I was a bike-riding missionary knocking on his door. “The last thing anyone wants to see is a VDOT employee eating ice cream while the road is collapsing.”

“But there’s nothing you can do and it’s killing-hot out here,” I argue.

“Forget it.”

I let it go. The road collapses. We get the pictures and the story and go over to Dips and Sips for a chocolate malt. The officers and VDOT crews go to another store and buy bottled water. It’s OK for them to be seen with water but not with ice cream.

To make someone choose water over ice cream proves we are a cruel, mean society.

Bob Gibson
Daily Progress political blogger

What good is a poll showing a congressional challenger 14 points down to incumbent 5th District Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr., R-Rocky Mount?

Plenty good, according to the campaign of Democrat Al Weed, who hired the Zogby International polling organization and paid for a late June survey that showed Goode leading Weed by 49.2 percent to 35 percent.

Perhaps Weed’s been down so long it looks like up to him. After all, voters in the 2004 election gave Goode 64 percent of the ballots cast to 36 percent for Weed, a 28-point margin, so anything much less than that margin looks significantly better.

There is some pretty good news in the poll results for Weed in his second challenge to the five-term congressman, said Fritz Wenzel, the polling firm’s director of communications.

“I just think it’s much closer for a small number of reasons,” Wenzel said. “Nationally, Republicans are stuck because they are lashed to a leader who is just not very popular.”

Tip the Trash Man

I don’t care what the veggie-boys say, summer salads can be hard, mighty hard on man, especially if that man wears a reflective vest and drives a big truck from trash can to trash can all day long like a giant, diurnal, motorized opossum

It’s a whole different kind of roughage that has nothing to do with ingestion, digestion and Beano. It has everything to do with baking in the hot sun and humidity for a week, creating a noxious odor that makes even the fly larvae gag and grow quicker into adulthood just to get away from home.

Pity the dustman. House to house he crawls, hauling your trash up close and personal to the truck and tipping it into the monster masher. Then he has spend hours in the heat and humidity with the garbage and odor riding hunchbacked on him like the Quasimodo of refuse with an odor that could launch a thousand lunches.

It’s ripe, man, ripe.

We ought to give these guys tips. We ought to leave them a U.S. Grant portrait in a Christmas card every year. We do more for waiters and hairdressers who make us happy than the folks who work hard to keep us from dirtying ourselves with our own waste.

Be daring. Leave your driver a little cash in a card on the next trash day. Add one of those little car fresheners that looks like a pine tree or a dolphin. I’m sure he’ll appreciate both.