I Heart New England

Most of the time I don’t make a big deal of it, but I am really proud to be a New Englander. New York may be the cultural center of the Universe, DC might be the aorta of our government, and LA is certainly the home of the stars, but us shellbacks are the people who make sure life in these United States are never boring for the rest of you fat fucks. (Ted Kennedy aside, studies show we have the lowest regional obesity rates in the country, so I honestly get to call the rest of you that – “fat fucks”. In your face, Tubby!)

Think I’m full of shit? Let’s review the month of January, shall we? The first month of 2006 has been a veritable shits-and-giggles-fest, courtesy of not one but three wacky shellbacks, each with his own unique but terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease.

First up: That fat bastard I was just talkin’ about, Ted Kennedy. Just when you think Ol’ Gin Blossoms has finally reached the terminus of his already marginal relevance, he goes and does something else that gets everybody’s panties in a bunch. This particular time, he made not one but two people cry during Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on top of pissing off the committee chairman when he caught him in a lie. He didn’t even have to try that hard; all he did was bring up Alito’s membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an ultra-old school organization that, among other things, seeks to put something of a kibosh to college admissions of women and minorities. First, Kennedy bickered with Arlen Specter over whether or not a paper trail for Alito’s involvement with the CAP had been requested for review by the Committee; Specter denied that he’d discussed the matter with Kennedy, and Kennedy in his turn essentially called Specter a goddamn liar. (Specter later admitted, without a hint of sheepishness, that he HAD been asked about documents related to Alito and the CAP, but had brushed them off as “unmeritorious”.) After this pissing match, another Republican on the committee, North Carolina pantywaist Lindsey Graham, was apparently so overcome with grief and horror by Kennedy’s insistent questioning about the CAP that he misted up as he assured Alito that he was “sorry you have to go through this”. “Are you really a closet bigot?” Graham rhetorically asked Alito, who remained poker-faced throughout the melodrama. “No sir, you’re not, I know you’re not,” Graham added, lips aquiver as he appeared to fight back Kennedy-induced tears. Martha Ann Alito, the nominee’s wife, burst into tears upon hearing Graham’s sobbing and had to be led, distraught, from the room, affording Kennedy a reproachful glance as she left. The whole scene was dissected by every news agency in the country that evening; the favored images were those of Graham’s mournful mug countered with images of Kennedy, smirking and arching his brow like a soap-opera cad.

Well, if soap-opera cads had bloated jowls and purplish, mottled noses from years of alcohol abuse, anyway.

Speaking of alcohol abuse, sometimes all you have to do is mention it to get a rise out of everyone in the current cultural climate of “recovery”, “co-dependence” and other AA-fostered blather about the ills of drinking. Reigning World Cup Alpine ski champion, Olympic favorite and New Hampshire native, Bode Miller found that out the hard way when “60 Minutes” “enabled” him to admit that he’d raced drunk before: “If you ever tried to ski when you’re wasted, it’s not easy,” he casually told Bob Simon.

“Are you saying that you’ll never do it again?” Simon schoolmarmishly pressed.

“No, I’m not saying that,” Miller replied – pretty reasonably, in my opinion. I mean, think about it…if you’re not familiar with competitive Alpine skiing, it entails cramming yourself into a spandex catsuit that looks like it was jacked from the closet of Scotty the Blue Bunny, strapping two narrow planks to your feet and barrel-assing down an icy 80-degree incline at about 90 miles an hour.  I don’t know anybody in their right mind who could even attempt such an endeavor without having knocked a couple back beforehand. Especially somebody whose parents named them “Bode”. (What is with skiers and weird names, by the way? The US’s female champ has it even worse than Miller in the handle department – her name is “Picabo”, pronounced like “Peekaboo”. To my knowledge, however, Peeky has never copped to skiing hammered.)

Evidently most folks involved in the sport didn’t agree with my assessment, though. Cunt-aching among Miller’s coaches, Olympic officials, and sports journalists began loud and hard the Monday after the “60 Minutes” segment aired. Miller offered a grudging apology – but still refused to pledge to never again ski while three sheets to the wind. As I write this, it’s been a couple of weeks and there’s still a lot of bitching going on, but Miller has clearly come out on top of the situation – Sports Illustrated, Time and Newsweek have all interviewed him since, and NBC has placed him at the center of their ad campaign for the Olympics.

Drinking on the job might be the only viable excuse for what put our third and final shellback in the news last month. Ed Cashman, a mild-mannered circuit judge in what I am forced to admit is my home state of Vermont, went berserk and shit in the mouth of an eleven-year-old molestation victim by giving her tormentor Mark Hulett a prison sentence of only sixty days in prison for the crime of repeatedly raping her over a four-year period. Cashman’s rationale, delivered to a packed and outraged courtroom as the Rasputin-lookin’ motherfucker of a defendant stared a hole in the artificial wood of the defense table, was that “punishment doesn’t work” and he’s grown fed up with seeing people thrown into prison to “feed on anger”. Since the State of Vermont had inexplicably classified Hulett as a “low-risk” sex criminal, he was ineligible for treatment in prison, which led Cashman to conclude that a brief prison sentence would get the child rapist into treatment more quickly. There’s only one problem with this view of the situation – it is completely and totally, without qualification, flat-out fucking WRONG. Generations of studies have shown that the only thing more useless than punishing child molesters is attempting to treat them – they are one group of offenders with a nearly 100% recidivism rate.  Hulett is more likely to spew fire from his ass than he is to respond positively to treatment. After 25 years on the bench Ed Cashman must realize this, but if he had any other reasons for his joke of a sentence, he hasn’t been sharing them. He’s been closemouthed with the media since his decision, and he also has yet to give the state any indication whether their attempt to get a longer sentence for Hulett by allowing him treatment in prison has gotten him to reconsider. I can’t say as I blame him – plenty of people literally want his head on a pike for this.

Naturally, Cashman’s idiocy hasn’t gone unnoticed nationally, especially not by the right-wing media. Bill “Ass Vibrator” O’Reilly in particular has seized this story as a dog seizes a bone, slobbering sanctimonious platitudes as he gnaws away at my state’s shameful liberal legacy. He knows that if he works it long and carefully enough, he’ll find a way to blame Howard Dean for it.

So there you have it. New England has come through for you in this long and dreary winter. We’ve regaled you with drinking stories. We’ve made Lindsey Graham cry like a little girl. We’ve set loose a dangerous child predator who’ll likely want to move to YOUR state when we drum him out of ours.  Oh well.

No need to thank us, really.

Addendum:  The morning after I wrote this article, Ed Cashman took the State of Vermont’s new conditions under advisement and extended Mark Hulett’s sentence to a minimum of three years. So Bill O’Reilly can take his rag off now.

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