Massachusetts’ Not-So-Super Tuesday
Exactly one year from today is Super Tuesday – when at least 13 states, including Massachusetts, hold their presidential primaries.
It used to be a big day of sorts in local politics, because often some local legend in his own mind would be on the ballot.
But after a run of (Ted) Kennedy, Dukakis, Tsongas, Kerry, Romney, the fake Indian and (lest we forget although we’d all certainly like to) Seth Moulton, carrying the Bay State brand on one’s backside doesn’t mean anything anymore in either party.
A year from today, most of the election news will be coming out of California and Texas. The three New England states involved – Maine and Vermont in addition to us – will be strictly a NIB. News in Brief.
On the Democrat side, once upon a time there would have been a lively fight looming, given Joe Biden’s abysmal record and obvious dementia. But the party has become a cult, and not even a peaceful Hare Krishna cult. More like the Brown Shirts.
Gene McCarthy or Ted Kennedy could challenge an incumbent and return to the Senate in peace. No longer. Dissent has become heresy. If you deviate (and that’s the word, in the old Soviet sense) from the Democrat party line, you will be shunned, if not destroyed.
You will be chased into bathrooms (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema), or branded a Russian asset (then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard) or the comrades will try to sink your houseboat (Sen. Joe Manchin).
No wonder no one’s lining up to take a run at the worst president in American history. But something might still happen. Look at the news dump Friday afternoon about the “lesion” on Biden’s chest. The Deep State is giving itself wiggle room in case the current catastrophe continues unabated.
Brandon may yet be a single Depends failure in public away from “retirement.” But most likely his care-givers would just blame… Trump, for sabotaging Brandon’s diaper supply.
Probably the best we can hope for on the Democrat side is a 2024 version of the late Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos of 2008. When Barack Obama began pulling away, Rush urged everybody to take a Democrat ballot and vote for Hillary Clinton, just to keep the turmoil going as long as possible.
The problem this year is that so far, Brandon’s only declared foe is Marianne Williamson, a 70-year-old “spiritual leader.” She never leaves home without her crystal ball. My crystal ball tells me a new Operation Chaos is not in the cards this cycle.
On the Republican side at least, rest assured that New Hampshire will continue to have the first GOP presidential primary, probably sometime in January, although if necessary to stay ahead of South Carolina, they’ll go one-on-one with Santa Claus.
For Massachusetts Republicans, New Hampshire was once a great opportunity to show their stuff. A bunch of young GOP state reps, including Paul Cellucci and Andy Card, got their starts in national politics in 1980 as volunteer drivers for future President George H.W. Bush.
As late as 2016, Lowell native Corey Lewandowski made his political bones running the Granite State for future president Donald J. Trump.
But now, one problem is that there are hardly any young GOP state reps left in Massachusetts, or old ones for that matter. That’s the sad legacy of former Republican state chairman Jim “Jones” Lyons, who in four short years reduced the party to utter irrelevance in state politics.
Lyons was ousted recently, but he and his crank cult of geriatric grifters and local losers dream of a return to “power,” as pathetic as that word sounds in the context of the current Mass GOP.
When Lyons staged his coup in 2019, the non-losers in the party left him $700,000 in the bank. As the party finally kicked him down the stairs five weeks ago, the GOP was $600,000 in the hole.
Vendors stiffed under Lyons’ crackpot regime are clamoring to be paid, the OCPF is blanketing the GOP demimonde with subpoenas, civil lawsuits are in the works and at least one police incident report is already in hand.
Yes, there is even surveillance video, which I will eventually post on social media with an appropriate Wilson Pickett soundtrack – “I’m a Midnight Mover.”
The point here is, both parties elect the 80 members of their state committees on Super Tuesday. So Jim Jones Lyons is already trying to put together a slate to… finish the job, of finishing off the GOP.
Lyons’ lunatic losers have even put out a spreadsheet of their dream candidates for state committee. One of them is ex-Sen. Dean Tran of Fitchburg, if only he can beat his recent felony indictment by a Worcester County grand jury on charges of stealing a firearm and intimidating an elderly person.
Few sane people in either party would dream of running for state committee, which is at the bottom of the Super Tuesday ballot. On the Democrat side, think Shelley Joseph, the future illegal-alien-releasing judge. She was elected from Brookline. Need I say more?
More people blank the committee races than bother to cast a vote for somebody who, in the case of most of Jim Jones’ acolytes, ought to be home praying for a happy death, as Dapper O’Neil used to say.
That’s the problem the crew trying to save the state GOP from complete oblivion have with Super Tuesday exactly a year away. How do you recruit candidates to go up against a wrecking crew who are only interested in… wrecking their own crew?
More than a century ago, an old Boston Brahmin, Godfrey Cabot Lowell, described the difficulties involved in taking on a corrupt crew of scoundrels:
“You can go out and kill a lion and get lots of people to help, but when you go out to kill a skunk you’ve got to do it yourself.”
That’s how far Super Tuesday has fallen in Massachusetts. It used to be a time for voters to at least pretend they were trying to select a future president.
A year from today, Super Tuesday may well be reduced to a handful of Republicans putting together a posse to hunt down a few rabid skunks.
