Marty Meehan has played hack game perfectly

Even at his preposterous salary of $659,168 a year, Marty Meehan will not be the richest fan walking into Foxboro Stadium today for the Pats’ playoff game against the Chargers.

However, the 62-year-old president of the University of Massachusetts will quite likely be the most loaded Tom Brady groupie who has never toiled a single solitary day in the Dreaded Private Sector.

I mean, compared to Maaaaahty, crackpot Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a titan of industry. We know she worked as a bartender/waitress at that taquiera in Manhattan – her coworkers have testified to the socialist’s unwillingness to share her own wealth — the cash and change in the tip jar — with her fellow oppressed members of the working class.

But in licking the plate clean, Maaaaahty is just going with the flow at ZooMass, which is now supposedly not an apt description of what was once the Bay State’s agricultural college. I don’t believe anything’s changed at UMass except the salaries, which now dwarf those in the rest of the state hackerama – see them all for youself right on the Herald website.

And of course, behind Meehan’s fabulous paycheck comes the equally bloated pension, and 80 percent of $660,000 is… $528,000 a year.

In other words, Marty is in line for a kiss of $10,000 a week, for life.

And don’t forget, he’ll also be grabbing a Congressional pension. After his solemn vow to the electorate to serve a mere three terms in the House, the very scholarly Meehan (degrees from UMass-Lowell and Suffolk) broke his promise and slurped for 15 years at the federal trough.

I hereby dub Marty Meehan the hacko di tutti hacki of Massachusetts. Nobody else comes even close. Waive the five-year retirement rule, immediately elect Meehan to the Bay Hack Hall of Fame, on a unanimous voice vote.

All in favor, say Oink oink.

By way of comparison, consider Billy Bulger, longtime kingpin of the political wing of the Bulger Crime Family. The Corrupt Midget also retired as president of UMass, and now collects a state pension of just over $200,000 grand a year.

What a difference a few decades make. When Meehan first ran for Congress back in 1992, he went to then Senate president Bulger, hat in hand, seeking his blessing. The meeting was arranged through an intermediary, a shady State House lobbyist. Marty has always played his cards well.

Of course, Meehan was running against incumbent Rep. Chester Atkins. On Beacon Hill, Atkins had always been known as “Billy Bulger’s butler,” for his smarmy obsequiousness to Whitey’s brother. Given that the serial-killing gangster was still at large, murdering his foes right and left, Meehan’s discretion was perhaps the better part of valor.

As a young payroll Charlie at the State House, Meehan’s greatest accomplishment came as a yes-man for the wacky secretary of state Mike Connolly. When Connolly appeared at a Gardner Auditorium press conference with his fly open, Marty somehow convinced local reporters not to put the hilarious footage on TV. (I wasn’t working that day.)

So Marty defeats Atkins in the ’92 primary, and Teddy Kennedy comes up to Lowell to offer his support at a rally at the old Speare House. More than somewhat hungover, Teddy stumbles into an upstairs function room festooned countless blue campaign posters – Marty Meehan for Congress.

So Ted naturally begins bellowing about how much he loves… Andy Meehan! My friend Andy Meehan. He will make a great Congressman for the Valley – Andy Meehan!

Andy, I mean Marty, didn’t take it personally of course. After all, Ted had been known to refer to Billy Bulger’s butler not as Chester, but as “Chuck Atkins.”

But why settle for being a Congressman making $175,000 when you can be the president of ZooMass for $660,000? Andy, er Marty, seen his opportunities and he took ‘em.

The state payroll is still larded with thousands upon thousands of worthless incompetent hacks. But they’re more dispersed now. So many of the traditional hackeramas are in disarray – the State Police, for example, ruined by GPS devices in cruisers. Toll booths – gone!

Also, since 9/11, it’s been harder to hide hacks at Massport, not impossible obviously, but they stand out more. And they’d much more difficult to explain away in the wake of another, God forbid, terrorist attack.

Likewise, it’s gotten more difficult to bury the junkie offspring of hack judges in either the probation department or the local d.a’s office. Just ask Judges Bibeau and Lawton about that.

But at UMass, nothing has changed, except that they’re grabbing more cash than ever before. And it’s not just ZooMass. All the fourth-rate state colleges – er universities, are wallowing in cash. They’ve all renamed themselves “universities” because it’s so worth so much more money to be the “executive deputy chancellor provost associate assistant dean” of a university than of a mere… college.

They used to say that pigs got fed and hogs got slaughtered. Not UMass hogs, obviously. And give Marty credit – he learned from his predecessor Billy Bulger’s miscues. Whitey’s brother surrounded himself with hacks way too familiar to most of us – second-generation State House coat-holders like Jim Julian, and C-list reporters like Bob Connolly.

Even Bulger’s board of trustees was packed with dodgy businessmen and Social Register hangers on. Once his enforcer brother took it on the lam, it was only a matter of time until the younger Bulger went down in flames.

Marty, on the other hand, surrounds himself with a crew of utter non-entities, who are more than happy to remain as such, given that starting pay for ZooMass non-entities is $450,000 a year. Can anyone name a single member of the UMass Board of Trustees?

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s Marty Meehan’s motto, and it’s made him a millionaire, many times over, not to mention his entire crew.

But as the Pats’ number-one fanboy Maaaahty heads off to the stadium this morning, I’m thinking of baseball, and what the late Bill Veeck once said of his sport, and how its dilemma  applies, in spades, to Meehan’s ZooMass.

“It’s not the high cost of talent that’s ruining the game, it’s the high cost of mediocrity.”