Still Charlie

Massacre is a thing prepared morally, spiritually & mentally far in advance of the crime. The fact that the perpetrators justify their slaughter because of some intolerable verbal or written incitement, is merely sordid spectacle of murderers trying to turn their own victims into accomplices. Misery loves company so does murder. This is only as much as George Orwell teaches us....

The Only People...

Who are truly excited about Mitt Romney running for President in 2016are serious devotees of high end political sadism. I promise you, when the time comes, Jeb Bush will tear out Mitt Romney's living guts and use them, to grease the treads of La Famiglia Arbusto's Tanks. It will be an ugly scene edifying only to those who enjoy their Dirty Politics Straight Up. The Bush Family has been strategically nice to Mitt Romney in two election cycles now they are gonna call those markers in, and if Mitt declines to Pay the Vig, Jeb will unleash the very furies out of hell on the Former Massachusetts Governor. Honestly, people like Mitt Romney (nice clueless media unsaavy tepid technocrats) have been PIE to the Bush Family for Twenty Four Years Now. Remember Steve Forbes, Bob Dole, John McCain...? All politicians of varying talents and all mounted heads on the Bush Family's Walls. All this proves to me that in RomneyWorld there is no one in that organization that dares enters The Bishop's Sanctuary and tell him the Sun Has Set on His Ambitions.

I guess We Are All Charlie Now....

as events unfold with the speed of a massacre in Paris and beyond. Of course it ought to be remarked in passing that "Charlie Hebdo" was a scurrilous publication by all accounts but the First Amendment exists to protect not the Gods but the Goddamned Grotesques...and never more have those grotesques needed succor, protection and justice. In a larger context though, a lot of copy will be devoted in the coming days attributing this whole god-awful situation in Paris to the lack of freedom and economic opportunity in the "Muslim World". That is true up to a point but it is also a fairly pat example of reflexive western Utilitarian Thinking. Poverty and Oppression are powerful things but to get so many young persons to enthusiastically embrace mayhem and their own consequent annihilation speaks of some powerful wellsprings of auto suggestion in the Middle East. Indeed auto suggestion so powerful and invasive that no contradictory thoughts or impulses rational or not may penetrate. Increasingly I come to the conclusion that there is a sub-rational context to the region's politics and it is so very powerful that our Western Utilitarian Balance of Power style Metrics are completely useless. And that....has powerful policy implications as the USA pursues yet another round of peace negotiations within the region.

Good Luck Chuck...

Let me enter a brief if predictable note of dissent as Charlie Baker is sworn in as Governor. My expectations are low to non existent, Charlie lacks charisma, he was elected by hundreds of thousands of ticket splitters which give him little hold over the legislature, his moderate GOP bona fides were largely the creation of fantasists at the Boston Globe & his public admin record was wracked up twenty years ago in very different times. I have a dread feeling in my gut he will bungle and bungle badly the current budget shortfall into some unimaginable catastrophe...nearly every Governor in living memory has had to deal with one, but trust me, Charlie will Make A Hash of It.

To Date all I known about

Charlie Baker's inaugural is that it is costing 200K less than Deval Patrick's....and that a vast junta of private entities with potential business before the Commonwealth are footing the bill....but then again that was 200k less as of last weekend and who knows what invoices have been cut since Sunday? My only other take away from the transition is the plethora of democrats who have been hired in gaudy showy capacities by the incoming governor. You'd think Baker would find it hard to get democrats to cross over, but in truth its easier for the majority to bargain with minority when jobs are on the line, the minority party can never find enough qualified candidates whilst the majority always abounds with thwarted ambitious would be administrators. Moreover disaffected democrats are as a common as dirt in Massachusetts just ask anyone who has ever run a "Unified Campaign Field Office" every so often some disheveled twitchy specimen will scuttle in and proclaim in ringing tones their die-hard opposition to the candidacies of Mark Roosevelt, Scott Harshbarger or Shannon O'Brien...usually because the nominee refuses to come out against Lunar Annexation or granting squirrels the right to vote. Its the same with all these Baker appointees...except they are getting paid for it.

R.I.P. Ed Brooke...

January that Killing Month, meanders on beckoning the Mighty to their Rest. *** It ought to be noted up front, that Ed Brooke was for a good long while, the most successful GOP Politician in Massachusetts until Bill Weld staggered onto the scene. Ed Brooke is also a little more ironically the last Attorney General of the Commonwealth who bootstrapped his way to higher office. Apparently he figured out how to do That Job Without Creating any enemies, a trick he clearly declined to teach to his successors as the state's top law person. Ed Brooke's abrupt departure from the US Senate (engineered in part by primary challenge from yappy local wingnut Avi Nelson and more sadly Brooke's own messy divorce) in 1978 ushered in twelve long fallow years for the Party of Lincoln in the Bay State. Ah but the times were turning on Ed Brooke even then, he was literally an endangered species in the GOP, a Bleeding Heart Liberal....he spent two terms in the US Senate fruitlessly trying to pull the republicans back to the center when they all longed to strap on fake cavalry sabers and riding off behind Ronald Reagan. I think if he'd a survived the general election in 1978 the GOP would have broken his heart....or maybe Edward Maximus might've induced him to flip over to the democrats (Ed always was famously independent and bipartisan in his politics)...who knows? In sum, Ed Brooke was a Man of Honor, he consciously wanted to Live Up to the Status of the First African American Elected to the US Senate in the 20th Century and what the hell, His Word Was Good. I can pay him no higher tribute.

January is the Season

for passages from off this Breathing Earth it seems. Case in point former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo who died yesterday. Cuomo was once one of those Apex Predators in the Democratic Party whose name was constantly bandied about as a potential Presidential Candidate for something akin to three election cycles. It was a tight little fraternity for a while there and included such luminaries as Senator Sam Nunn, Senator Dale Bumpers and Governor Cuomo. None of them ever took the bait, although with his gift for eloquence, tendency to public rumination & proverbial thin skin there was something weirdly "watchable" whenever Cuomo wrestled with the decision to run even if he came up with the same answer time after time. In life Mario Cuomo was a Jeffersonian, in good times he was for "The Man and The Dollar" (to quote Abraham Lincoln) but if those things came into conflict then he was for The Man, First and Foremost. So its a little ironic that a recession wracked discontented New York Electorate finally gave Cuomo the heave-ho in 1994 ending an eloquent, brilliant and somewhat enigmatic career in politics. I actually shook hands with him briefly on West 57th Street in Manhattan some ten years ago, he was game but a little preoccupied looking, ah but that is how it goes with the smart ones they are always thinking Big Thoughts.