http://www.nationalreview.com/node/435335/print Let’s Don’t Put On a Show
A conspectus against political grandiosity
By Kevin D. Williamson — May 13, 2016
The only thing I know about Kasim Reed is that he’s the mayor of Atlanta and I hate him.
If you’ve had the experience of going through the Atlanta airport recently, you’ll be familiar with the deeply grating voice of Mayor Reed, who greets travelers with self-aggrandizing North Korea–style loudspeaker announcements in which he extols the virtues of his boring, sweaty little city and labors mightily to associate himself with military men. It’s the 500-megawatt-amplifier version of those dumb signs in which Governor Andrew Cuomo welcomes Fairfield County commuters to New York every time they cross the line from Connecticut: Using public infrastructure for purely self-promotional purposes, as though all of New York State were a gubernatorial fiefdom and all of Atlanta Kasim Reed’s personal playground.
I may have mentioned before that I detest the State of the Union address, that batty, pseudo-monarchical pageant that serves as the Easter Vigil Mass in the presidential cult. And while that horrifying spectacle may be the worst of our national offenses against good taste and republican manners, there are a few other similar indicators of the fact that our political leaders sometimes forget who works for whom.
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