On the subject of gay marriage

Jeff Jacoby had this to say in today's Sunday Globe:
"America's political battles would be a lot less poisonous if more combatants would acknowledge that their opponents are not monsters or villains".
Lofty sentiments no?
Jacoby is of course ramping up the meme that pro-gay marriage libs are somehow demonizing Jeff's vast thwarted majority of simple god fearing American book worshippers.
So Jeff wants to have debate about legitimacy and comity eh?
This is interesting because legitimacy lies at the very core of the gay marriage debate.
One side asserts that it is "legitimate" for them to hold a supervisory role over the marital status of their neighbors.
The other side sez that ain't right and any appropriation of state power to enforce said supervisory role is not "legitimate".
Jeff's central thesis seems to be that the majority may impose itself in a "lawful manner" on a minority and that further they minority shouldn't cuss about it.
Cuz' that isn't "legitimate" either.
At least Jeff Jacoby is consistent, he has always maintained that the law is a function of divine revelation and that therefore straights shall over the queers on grounds of revealed religion all prettied up with laws and precedents.
Here he simply takes his argumemt thru to it's own logical conclusion and handily sets up his usual New Year's Straw Man which is the abiding menace of liberal hate speech.

State Senate President Travaglini apologizes

After being caught making dark threats about the fate of Governor Elect Deval Patrick's pending legislative program.

Humble Elias thinks that Travie woke up Thursday morning to startling and unaccustomed revelation that the Governor Elect was a democrat about whom the Senate President knew little and who likewise owed exactly nothing to Travaglini.
So in a nervous fret Big Bob started making threats...Happens all the time in lege, doesn't mean anything will come of it, only that the power brokers are jittery.
After all, sixteen years have passed since they had to dicker with a democrat in the corner office, the old intra-party governing skills have understandably atrophied.
Besides, Travie and DiMasi have long reigned as the top dems in the state, it is hard to yield the spotlight when you've been getting it easy for years.

Frankly, I've always maintained that electing a popular democrat as governor could act as a powerful deterrent to "business as usual" on Beacon.
A democratic governor has resources real and intangible that are denied a republican chief executive. That too may be on Senate President Travaglini's mind...who can say?

Mitt Dummies Up

According to The Globe, Governor Romney has already mastered the art of declining any questions from reporters as he looks to start campaigning for President.
This has come in handy as admittedly low key questions have bubbled up over Mitt's real feelings about gay rights and the dazzling myriad of contradictory positions that describe his stance(s) on abortion.
I think the best way for him to weasel out of any accusations of opportunism and flip floppery is to simply start denying that he'd ever been Governor of Massachusetts in the first place.
That way, anything he said between January 2003 and January 2007 automatically becomes "unhistory".
Sure it's a lie, but so are the Viceroy's pretensions to leadership, character and honesty...so whats da diff?

Based on today's column...

Does anyone else get the impression that no-one in Deval Patrick's nascent administration is talking to Joanie Vennochi?
She frantically knits together a disparate collection of news items to suggest that not five weeks after the election, the bloom is somehow off the Patrick rose.
Honestly, you could time the appearance of the "Joanie Vennochi is disillusioned" column to the minute.
Remember this is the same Joanie Vennochi who snarled about "democrats drinking the Devalkool-aid" back in September, so despite her current air of shocked innocence don't kid yourself she was never on our side.
Having few identifiable ideological precepts (other than her hatred and envy of John Kerry) it is inevitable that she'd start snarking early at Deval Patrick. If she can't get anyone on the phone over at the Corner Office then has nothing else to write about than her own disaffection.
But then this seems to a column malaise over on Morrissey Boulevard, Scott Lehigh has been fumbling around with national and international politics to no effect since the election and Brian McGrory has become amusingly incoherent.
None of them seem to have come to grips with the change as yet.
Oh well give them time, they have new depths they can sink to, never fear.

John Kerry does a meet-n-greet wif da Bloggers

So reporteth Seth Gitell.

Hey John old buddy?
How come Humble Elias wasn't invited? Hell I'm closest thing you have to "Waylon Smithers" on the internet...Your own wife doesn't enable you with half the ardor as this, The Little Blog That Cried.

Okay I know the answer to that...This is a blog renowned amongst it's seven or so readers for it's nastiness, vituperation, crapulous editing, indifferent spelling and lots of what Boston Magazine has called "sarcastic rant driven chatter".

On the other hand, at this point, why wouldn't you wanna piece of that??

It has to beat the lugubrious nonsense you get from the smarmy likes of Scott Lehigh.

Think about it John, I work cheap!

It is December...

another year walks the green mile.
All over the commonwealth, neath' the mistletoe next to those stockings hung so carefully whispers go on steadily...everyone wants to know will end up on Jeff Jacoby's annual compendium of "liberal hate speech"?
2006 was a bad year for the remains of movement conservatism and the praetorian class in general, so expect a column that is rigorously spiteful with a honking puritan tone of injured morality.
Now, knowing Jeff as a frantic if unoriginal thinker, we can expect some obscure utterance from Deval Patrick or his supporters to make the list.
Senator Kerry's botched joke may well provide Jeff''s lead, like I said, '06 was a bad year for the GOP and beating a dead horse is thought to be very good therapy in conservative circles.
Jeff may also take off after the local or national bloggers...all those message boards with all those posts are just too tempting a target. Look for "Blue Mass Group" and it's moderators to get in the cross-hairs.

Of course, it goes without saying that Kerry Healey's Orangeshirt Squadristi, Howie Carr's homophobic dementia, the Governor's gruesome hatred for the very state he leads, or Rush Limbaugh's demands for all out atomic warfare in the Middle East will all be passed over in silence.

Cuz, all that is not "hate speech" it is stern contrarians and iconoclasts tacking against the liberal wind blah blah blah...
You've heard it all before.
Anyway those are my predictions let us see how I do as a seer.

Game On...Mah Friends...

The new congress has not even settled on it's collective duff before Barack Obama has danced off to Manchester New Hampshire.
He was received like he was Germanicus returning to Rome with the second lost eagle of Varus.
Well folks this is it, the great game is once again afoot a lot of money and organization is in play to find an alternative to Senator Hillary Clinton, right now the spotlight shineth brightly on the Junior Senator from Illinois.
If we were to dissect the game play here there is much to suggest his candidacy. He is a Midwesterner, he is a back bencher in the senate but that also means he has no lengthy record to fuel attack adverts. He is also charismatic, telegenic and reasonably energetic.
The question is, can he carry the ball into the goal zone in a general election?
Well that is a question we can ask of all the candidates quite frankly. Humble Elias suspects a lot of powerlibs on and off long might gamble on an African American being no less odious to the electorate than a woman with as long an alleged rapsheet as Senator Clinton.
The conventional wisdom suggests that Obama is poison to any hopes Senator Kerry has of running again in 2008. Well yeah...Senator Obama has formidable talents...but then I can recall with the simplest nostalgia when the Smart Aleck Legion once assured us that Wesley Clark was the end of John Kerry's White House Dreams.

Game on...game on indeed