Time writer Jay Newton-Small covered the “New America” Republican event in Arlington, but she somehow got lost at the strip mall as she mangled several local geographic and political realities. She began:
If House and Senate Republican leaders have their way, Saturday’s gathering at Pie-Tanza, a strip-mall pizza joint in Arlington, Va., will be remembered as the beginning of the rebirth of the Grand Old Party. In addition to pizza, the venue, selected by the freshly born, center-leaning National Council for a New America (NCNA), served up symbolism: suburban areas like this one, on the outskirts of Washington, were GOP bastions not so long ago, and they’ll need to come back to the fold for a Republican resurgence.
First, Arlington is hardly on the “outskirts” of Washington: it used to be part of the District of Columbia. Second, Arlington has never been a “GOP bastion” in my 22 years of residency in northern Virginia, where I first rented an apartment about six blocks from the strip mall she’s describing. That’s why the Democrats carved out Arlington and Alexandria to make a Democratic congressional district after the 1990 census.
Then just look at the adjectives: what on Earth is “center-leaning“?