Those Who Would Lead Us

(Crossposted, in edited form, at The American Street)

I've tried to keep the worst of the Road Paving Battle out of these pages, out of reluctance to come off like Dustin Hoffman's Lenny Bruce in the last reel. But it's really and truly over now. The last nail went into the coffin at last night's Loudoun County Board of Supervisors meeting. They won't try that again anytime soon. Plenty of other nastiness, sure, but not paving this particular road.

A great deal of e-mail flew back and forth from both sides during the ugly business, some of it openly slanderous, probably actionable. But one missive in particular is worth pointing up for its spectacular rudeness. It came two nights ago to my neighbor Mary, one of the ringleaders of the anti-paving effort and a fearless thorn in the side of the utterly contemptible Board of Supervisors -- one of the crookedest deliberative bodies in the United States. Cc'd to every member of both sides of the argument, it came from the beaten and abused keyboard of one Eugene DelGaudio, Supervisor, Sterling District.

I reproduce it here, with not one letter changed:

THERE WAS NEVER ANY CHANCE YOUR ROAD WOULD BE PAVED "SECRETELY" DUE TO A REQUEST TO CONSIDER SAME. THANK YOU.

EUGENE DELGAUDIO
STERLING DISTRICT

Savor the contempt and flat-out loathing for its interlocutrix that this missive barely conceals. All-caps yelling. Impatient, clipped syntax. The wingnut passive-aggressive "quote marks" around the amusingly misspelled word -- in a later reply he implied that any imputation of "secrecy" on the part of the Board was political "spin" from his enemies.*

Nasty stuff, no?

Well, this is the man who was shrieking at my neighbor.

Here's an extract:

Delgaudio [is] executive director of the group Public Advocate of the United States. For its part, Public Advocate is, on the surface, a typical "Family Values" lobbying group. However...Public Advocate has been known to support a vehemently anti-gay platform, and indeed has been known to express these ideas, both in postal mailings and even in theatric "performances" outside Capitol Hill...:

"You'll see men hand-in-hand skipping down to adoption centers to 'pick out' a little boy for themselves," read a 1998 letter from Delgaudio seeking money to fight gay adoptions.

Delgaudio targets "pro-homosexual" politicians from both parties, using media-ready skits that he calls "conservative political street theater." Past productions include a "Man-Donkey Mock Wedding Ceremony" outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a "Perverts for Cellucci" rally to protest President Bush's nomination of then-Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci to be ambassador to Canada.

This is the man who was shrieking at my neighbor.

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*This is nothing less than complete bullshit: If somebody hadn't caught one tiny paragraph at the end of a long, boring article in our local freebie advertiser, we'd be looking at bulldozers next week.