He’s baaaack . . . ! “He” being Bill O’Brien, the former speaker of the New Hampshire House, who during his relatively brief tenure managed to strew discord liberally around the State House.
He, we discovered a little over a week ago, was a major inspiration for a Republican House legislative group that’s dubbed itself the Freedom Caucus in honor of the similarly-named GOP congressional members who have over the last six years or so have made the U.S. Congress nearly ungovernable.
The local outfit proudly wreaked a little havoc themselves, ensuring that for the first time in the memory of man – or at least in many decades – the House failed to pass a budget, turning the whole thing over to the somewhat less manic Senate.
And that was only the start of a run of news, local and national, that we can safely call . . . well, interesting. And diverting. And sometimes depressing. A random look back . . .
Last week Alabama got a new governor and all Americans got a great lesson on why people who are not technologically adept should stay on the straight and narrow. The former Alabama governor – a 74-year-old doctor who was elected on the strength of his devotion to high Christian morals – had to resign when he used state resources to conceal his affair with an aide.
The sorry saga came out when he inadvertently sent copies of his torrid emails and tweets to his mistress to his own wife – now ex-wife – as well, and she promptly turned them over to authorities.
As New York Times columnist Gail Collins pointed out, “when your wife’s name is Dianne, it’s a very bad idea to send her a text saying ‘I love you, Rebekah.’”
In the corporations behaving badly category, United Airlines rose to the top (or bottom?) of the list when its minions sent security officers to remove by force a 69-year-old passenger who refused to be “volunteered” to leave his duly paid-for seat so a United employee could use it.
And when several videos of the resulting assault on the hapless man – which included dragging him, bleeding, from the plane – caused outrage worldwide, airline CEO Oscar Munoz fed the anger by sending a company-wide memo calling the incident “upsetting” but saying the employees “followed established procedures” and commending all “for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right.”
Then the Louisville Courier-Journal, the assaulted passenger’s hometown paper and winner (in its long-gone heyday) of numerous Pulitzer Prizes, deliberately compounded the man’s grief and humiliation by dredging up his legal problems from 14 years ago – problems which had absolutely nothing to do with the violent assault on him in an airplane on a Chicago runway.
And in a bizarre touch, someone speaking for the beleaguered Chicago Police Department – which itself was not in any way whatsoever involved in the plane incident – felt compelled (from force of habit, perhaps?) to tell reporters that whatever injuries the man on the plane suffered were caused not by any assault but when “he fell.” Guess that spokesman missed the video.
If United’s Munoz was having a bad week, Sean Spicer’s was worse. Already considered the worse presidential press secretary ever – worse even than Ron Ziegler, the Nixon aide who got his chops as a tour guide at Disneyland – the blustering Spicer has suffered the indignity (in TrumpWorld) of being portrayed by a girl (the irreplaceable Melissa McCarthy) on Saturday Night Live. He regularly spouts incoherent word salads, and his own boss, Donald Trump, has mocked his attire.
But last week he truly outdid himself by doing something absolutely no one in public life should ever, ever do.
He brought up the name of Hitler. And he compared Hitler favorably to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As in saying that at least Hitler – the man, remember, who did his best to exterminate all German (and other European) Jews in gas chambers – didn’t use “gas on his own people.” And – unbelievably – Spicer did this during Passover.
Oh, Sean, Sean, Sean. How could you? Even the reporters you routinely attack and vilify were stunned. They tried to throw you lifelines, asking you for clarification, maybe you really meant to say . . .
And you kept digging yourself deeper. At one point, you threw out a reference to “innocent people.” Your increasing panic was pure awful to behold.
So, of course, you then had to spend the rest of the week crawling from talk show to talk show, leaving piles of ever-more-abject apologies in your wake. And your mortification was almost enough to get late-night comics to cease needling you. Almost. But not quite.
Because how could they, a week before Easter, bear to forgo bringing up your stint a decade or so ago, as a fluffy White House Easter Bunny?
From Easter bunny in the reign of George W. Bush to press secretary under Donald Trump – that’s quite a leap! And now, maybe, back to Easter Bunny?
No, not a demotion. Just as a temporary stint at the annual Easter Egg Roll, a 138-year-long tradition that’s the largest single annual event staged at the White House and utterly beloved by area children, last year drawing 37,000 people to the lawn. It’s scheduled for tomorrow.
But it wasn’t until late February – when the guy who runs the wood turning company in Maine where the wooden eggs are manufactured sent a tweet (yes, now the official government communications channel) to Trump himself, Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump asking if the event had been cancelled – that anyone at the new White House seemed to hear about it.
Last week, when the Times took a look at the prep so far, the prospect wasn’t promising. The hundreds of volunteers needed were just being recruited, tickets hadn’t gone to the various schools and other organizations, including military families, who regularly got them, no A-list entertainers had been recruited, and there will likely be only one character from Sesame Street, compared with the dozens who attended past events.
Which may be karma, since Trump proposes zeroing out funds for PBS and Sesame Street.
But maybe, given the newly chilly relationship between the White House and Russia, Trump’s folks could find a gay Vladimir Putin clown or two to do the honors. After all, a decree this week in Russia added gay Putin clowns – apparently Moscow is crawling with gay Putin clowns – to the list of things constituting “extremism.”
The Washington Post, helpfully, explained that Item 4071 (imagine, a list of more than 4,000 items constituting extremism!) was “a picture of a Putin-like person ‘with eyes and lips made up,’ captioned with an implicit anti-gay slur, implying ‘the supposed nonstandard sexual orientation of the president of the Russian Federation.’”
How could that be any scarier than Oscar the Grouch?
I suspect a lot White House watchers will be tuning in for tomorrow’s egg roll. After all, asked Melinda Bates, who as director of the White House Visitors Office ran the Clinton egg rolls for eight years, if an administration can’t pull off an egg roll, what is it really competent to do?
Good question.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)