The 2010 health care law, the Environmental Protection Agency, protecting the interests of the individual—Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli turned on nearly all his boilerplate bromides in accepting the “Defender of the Constitution” Award today at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
In introducing the Cooch to an adoring crowd, National Rifle Association president David Keene described the feisty prosecutor as a staunch conservative born who came to prominence as a state senator representing that liberal thicket known as Northern Virginia. But the greatest burden Cuccinelli has overcome in his 43 years, Keene said, is that he was born in mostly blue New Jersey.
“He’s apologized,” Keene said before handing the Cooch the award, which included an ancient parchment signed by James Madison and James Monroe. (Not for nothing, but about an hour earlier in the ballroom, Kirk Cameron, the Growing Pains star-turned-evangelical activist told the crowd, “I wish my name were Marty McFly and I had a DeLorean so I could visit” the framers of the Constitution.” We’re hoping for a budget increase so we can investigate whether Mike Seaver personally retrieved Cuccinelli’s award by bending the space-time continuum.)
Once on stage, it was all braggadocio from the Cooch, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2013. (A recent poll put his approval rating at 46 percent.)
“I want to thank the NRA and CPAC for this award. Must have been a slow year,” he began. Oh, so modest, Cooch! But from there he did his standard stump act, tearing into the health care law, which he proudly pointed out he filed a lawsuit against moments after President Obama signed it on March 23, 2010, the 235th anniversary of the Revolutionary War leader Patrick Henry’s famous declamation of “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
At CPAC, such a historical note goes a long way. The crowd loved it. Oh, and then Cuccinelli zinged EPA head Lisa Jackson by leading the room in a group exhale, because, you know, carbon dioxide! With several hundred people letting out a low, loud “ahh,” the Cooch grinned into the microphone and sassed one off:
“Hi, Lisa.”
But for all the rhapsodizing about the Founding Fathers and legal belligerence toward the White House, Cuccinelli’s speech felt lacking. There was no mention, at all, of his newest signature issue.
The rats! What about the rats, Cooch? Not only is Cuccinelli a Tea Party darling, an inquisitor of women’s health and a censor of state emblems, he’s also America’s leading fighter of rats.
That’s why I figured he was getting this award, for bravely defending the Old Dominion from the hordes of rats that D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) was supposedly plotting to export there. The Cooch even enlisted Rush Limbaugh’s bluster to ward off the imminent rat invasion, despite the blatant fact that Cheh’s Wildlife Protection Act, which is intended to encourage less-lethal methods in dispersing animals, does not cover rats because, you know, they’re pests!
Still, Cuccinelli’s ire over the issue prompted the Great Rat Summit of 2012. How could CPAC organizers overlook such a momentous event when singing the Cooch’s praises?
How does anyone forget the Great Rat Summit?
