Charlie Baker siccing the fun police on us in Massachusetts

Gov. Charlie Baker says no more backyard parties.

“Today I am authorizing all state and local police officers to enforce these orders,” he pompously declared Friday. “Event hosts who violate these orders will be subject to fines.”

Comrades, it is now a crime to have fun in Maskachusetts.

If only Joe Biden’s friend “Charlie Parker” had been half as concerned with regulating the nursing homes he is mandated to keep sanitary and under control, maybe Massachusetts wouldn’t have the third-highest death rate in the nation, not to mention the worst unemployment rate.

For those of you keeping score at home, the current count is more than 5,550 people dead in Massachusetts nursing homes, zero dead at backyard parties.

“Think about a party,” the overseer of nursing homes was saying on Friday. “Take a Fourth of July party or even a birthday party. Forty or 50 people in somebody’s backyard. Moms and dads, the kids, all the rest, nobody wearing a face mask, nobody social distancing. One or two people there who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic.”

Not sick, in other words.

“Hugs! Handshakes! High-fives! Dancing!”

Sounds like Weekend at Karyn’s out in Shrewsbury. And no cops are writing up his lieutenant governor and her crew of party animals.

“Who knows, right?” Baker said. “A whole bunch of people walk away from there, little ticking clocks that are gonna go off at some point!!!”

H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”

Charlie Parker is a Puritan.

What set Charlie off on his Cotton Mather-like rant was what he termed “a slight uptick upwards.” As opposed, presumably, to a slight uptick downwards. Not in deaths, or even hospitalizations, but just in “positive cases,” which doesn’t mean you’re dead. It just means you … tested positive.

We live in a state where violent felons are being released from jail willy-nilly to commit more gruesome crimes. Charlie Parker says nothing — couldn’t care less. Instead he sets up multiple snitch lines so that local busybodies can dime out their neighbors for pool parties.

But it’s not just parties that were driving Charlie crazy Friday. It was also … potato chips. Pot is legal in Massachusetts, but potato chips — forget about it. At least in restaurants, when customers try to defy Charlie’s diktat that they must order a full meal.

“One of the things that’s come up a number of times is, um, that pretzels and potato chips meet the food-service requirement. It clearly doesn’t! And, um, what we tried to do with the amendment of the order is make absolutely clear you need to have serious food, that’s prepared food on site. And the people who are in your venue need to order and eat food if they’re going to order a drink.”

Do you have to eat the peas too, Governor? Or the lima beans? Or can you just push them to the side of the plate and still get a Silver Mojito over ice?

“Some of this came out of conversations we had with the ABCC (Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission) and some of it came out of conversations we had with our colleagues in local government.”

Colleagues means hacks. Not one hack has lost a dime out of his paychecks during Charlie’s ongoing meltdown. The only ones these officious, smug payroll patriots never talk to are the people who work in the Dreaded Private Sector, or the 1,144,983 Massachusetts residents who have lost their jobs in the last six months.

But Charlie Parker isn’t just an expert nutritionist. He also knows better than you do what your young kids need to grow up to become solid citizens, like his son A.J.

“For instance,” he lectured, “parents everywhere should reconsider having big play dates, and parents in high-risk towns should really avoid spending time with other families, certainly large group gatherings.”

This is a guy directly responsible for the 76 dead at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, and he’s issuing orders on how we should best protect our own kids, or anybody else for that matter?

“There have been many reports of pool parties, birthday parties, holiday parties, Fourth of July parties, all of which have been documented in great detail by our contact tracing that have demonstrated that parties held in people’s homes and their backyards have continued, contributing significantly to community spread and new community clusters.”

Clusters of fun! That will not stand, not in the Fourth Reich of Maskachusetts.

“Many of them involve um private recreational activities where people got together in large groups of people they were familiar with and they didn’t wear masks, they didn’t socially distance and you can just see the point to point to point to point as it moves away from there.”

Sounds like the rioting that Charlie Parker dismisses as “large gatherings.” As long as you’re looting stores, it keeps the virus at bay. Right, Tall Deval?

Do you want to throw a backyard party this afternoon and not have to worry about a no-knock raid by the new COVID Enforcement and Intervention team?

Just put a sign out in your front yard: “Welcome to Polito Nursing Home.”

Charlie Parker’s jackbooted thugs won’t bother you. Except to maybe pick up the check made payable to the Baker Committee.