Oh, the Shame

Oh, the shame: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

The Dallas County GOP must be feeling pretty Dickensian right about now, Buzz figures. Between their despised fearless leader in the White House turning more Captain Queegish daily, and local first-term Dems looking more and more like Keystone Kops, are Dallas Republicans crying or laughing?

(Note the two—two!—literary references there. Who said that degree from SIU wasn't worth the paper it was printed on? Besides the dean and prospective employers, we mean.)

We've said it before: The problem with being a yellow-dog Democrat arises when your party actually runs a yellow dog. For example, you got your first-term Dem sheriff, Lupe Valdez, making liars out of everyone who ever said things couldn't get worse at the jail, hiring a grant writer who spent a year not writing grant proposals and making it tougher for detectives to interview potential witnesses at the jail.

Then you got your first-term county judge, Jim "The Accidental Candidate" Foster, calling in sick, or at a funeral, or locked in his own car or something when it came time to decide the fate of fellow Democratic Constable Mike Dupree. Why do we have an ugly feeling that Foster turned in a scrawled sick note to his fellow commissioners signed "Judge Foster's Mother"?

Then of course you have Dupree. Mike. Effing. Dupree. Jesus wept. Need we say more?

Buzz has a red handprint etched on our forehead from smacking it each morning as we read The Dallas Morning News. Our hope was that local Republicans, being way old and somewhat dotty, might not have noticed the gaffes. Fat chance.

"We have tried repeatedly to warn voters about the dangers of electing unqualified and unprincipled Democrats to important county offices," Dallas GOP Chairman Kenn George wrote on the party's Web site. "Unfortunately for all of us, they have now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt they are completely unfit to administer our justice system."

"The Democrats' track record in our justice system has always been a joke. But this time the punch line isn't Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton, and nobody in Dallas County is laughing," says local GOP executive director Mike Walz.

Yeah, well, thanks for the told-ya-so, but we seem to recall a few problems with the old GOP-led justice system too—bad jail, accusations of corruption, scads of innocent people trucked off to the penitentiary, etc. But then Buzz lacks the collective amnesia so crucial to keeping a straight face in politics.