"demonstrated his commitment to being with everyday people"

Dear Dr. Bones,

The Blue Blazers (BB) are more fun than nine barrels of wingnutettes, yet I incline to expect they do not actually enjoy being dissented from much more than we Lesser Breeds Without (LBW) do.

Now amongst the LBW figures a certain Comrade Conroy, who insists on making an embarrassment of himself before the Cærulean nobility and gentry by buttonholing them in their corridors of publicity and insisting that he, Comrade Conroy, is holier than is St. Elizabeth of H*rv*rdy. ¡FAR holier!

This pest wastes the time of his Betters with such silly immodest stuff as

* Doesn’t it make sense to choose a candidate who has ["Me, who have"] worked for years and offered solutions on the broad range of critical issues facing our state and our nation — strengthening our economy, creating new jobs, improving our schools, protecting our environment, controlling health care costs — rather than just one narrow area of expertise? * Isn’t the smart choice a candidate who has ["Me, who have"] good working relationships in both government and the business community, who has taken the best of both to write new laws that are helping create jobs in Massachusetts right now?

The rhetoric is not as bad as the cause. Observe how a certain four-letter verb--begins with ‘W’--gets a thorough w*rkout. Her Beatitude will, if nominated and elected, presumably go in for all play, all the time. And never, ever, get caught Creating a JOB.

I fear it is a little uncertain that our Betters value J.C. ("job creation") so highly that that tactic will have all the impact on them original-intented, but one does not, after all, know this for sure. And in any case, it was a nice try, worthy of a 'B+' at least in my view. ¿How would you score it, sir?

Those are the last two salvos of five from the conguy. The one in the middle impressed me most:

And don’t we also want a candidate who can win back all those Democratic leaning voters in Worcester and Lowell and Taunton — the guys who defected to Brown last time? Don’t we want a candidate who can relate to them, who knows what it means to be unemployed [0], who has met them on the street and in their fire stations and front porches on a walk to the four corners of this state, and demonstrated his commitment to being with everyday people?

I’d say Comrade Conroy has put a new twist on _fas est et ab hoste doceri_: he gives the impression of having sat humbly at the feet of Senator Fratboy, or perhaps more profitably at the boardroom table of the Funders of Fratboy, LLC, to learn how to dispose of the fiendish and frivolous St. Elizabeth. [1]

That ploy is more than just rhetorical, obviously. Unfortunately the non-rhetorical part seriously misfires _chez moi_. "No, comrade, I am not, as it happens, especially shopping for "committment to being with everyday people." Committment to being on the floor of the Senate would be more to the point, and committment to voting there the way that I would vote myself would be better still. I appreciate that being one four- or five-millionth of a constituency is not likely to let me call a Fratboy or Conroy up and get my exact policy druthers on every bill that comes down the pike, BUT, although I admit it would be dotty to expect to get that much, I don't think it at all unreasonable to desire it. There is no way not to take what one gets from one's ‘representatives’ in Congress, but that is no reason to forget what it was that one wanted. [2]

The most charitable construction, I guess, is to gloss it a little and hope that the comrade has resolved to commit himself to "being with everyday people ON THE ISSUES." That could pass for Mere Demonocracy, maybe, although that ‘everyday’ epithet looks very like a weasel to me. [3] It suggests that the comrade has in mind some particular class of Weekend People, or Holiday People [4], or the like, whose wishes would count for less with "Senator Conroy."

Why, ¡the comrade might even mean the Blue Blazers! Though if he does, it is not very sensible not to ward of such a suspicion a little more when holding out his begging bowl here, right square in front of the Palace of Public Television atop the Great Blue Hill. ’Tis a bold beggar who frankly admits to his customers that all spare change contributed will probably be used against them.

I have heard it rumored that literal panhandlers sometimes use that technique successfully, and of course in a certain sense Courage is always lovely, but . . . .

Happy days.
--JHM

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[0] Though not much into anecdotal gossipdence, I cannot help wondering whether the comrade has not carefully ‘crafted’ that sentence for purposes of _suggestio falsi_. From Big LEW's account of him, it seems unlikely that he was ever what you would call SERIOUSLY disemployed. "Between jobs," no doubt, for that is a fate that can befall even a Yalie, but . . . .

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[1] This cannot have actually happened, but it is pleasant to reflect that if it had, the Fratboy Funders would probably have hired a hit man to give Comrade Conroy a brief course of Whitey Bolger Therapy. ¡Intolerable, that this ratfink of a seemin’ _chela_ should leak all of Master Scotty's secret campaign plans!

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[2] "¡Take *that*, Dr. Altzheimer!"

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[3] Or, if not a weasel, then a Populist. You will remember, Dr. Bones, that we agreed long ago that the cardinal difference beetween plain vanilla Demonocrats like ourselves and dubious Populists is that the former accept all comers as belonging to US The People, whereas the latter indispensably require an additional category of "Enemies of the People."

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[4] Either of these would do nicely to grace the plinth of the straw statue of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet erected by Comrade Conroy. Her Beatitude's alleged disdain for the ‘W’ word and for the J. C. process, noted above, amount, ¿do they not?, to wishing that weekends and holidays could be with us 24/7.

Her Beatitude is undeniably a Populist, a notorious recognizer of Enemies, from whom She proposes to deliver us small people. Not quite the same Enemies of Quotidianity that Comrade Conroy detects, but definitely Enemies.

(( More exactly, one *can* deny that proposition, but only by supposing that Her Beatitude secretly proposes to sell us all to Wall Street the moment She can do it safely. I do not much care for Her Beatitude, as you know, sir, but that is only ridiculous. ))