Maura Healey’s ‘America is burning’ blunder should worry voters

Regrets, Maura Healey’s had a few, just like Frank Sinatra, but then again, too few to mention. Except for one, apparently.

Back in the late spring of 2020, in the middle of the Black Lives Matter-antifa rioting-looting-arson-murder spree across the nation, Maura decided to go full-blown woke.

This is what she said, in her prepared text of a speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce:

“Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”

She was so darned proud of her fight-the-power turn of phrase that she even tweeted it out.

Her Che Guevara-esque moment hasn’t aged well, to say the least. So this week she went to Commonwealth Magazine, a semi-official organ of the local woke establishment, and issued the most insincere of apologies.

“I wish I could do it over again because I would not have used that phrase to make my point, which was certainly not about violence in the streets — ”

Let me see if I have this straight: she was celebrating “burning” — which is arson — but she wasn’t advocating violence? So is arson now a “nonviolent” crime? Who is she channeling here, Ricardo “Let ‘em Go” Arroyo?

“– or anything related to what was happening in terms of protests around George Floyd’s murder.”

Sorry, Maura, this does not pass the smell test, and not because George Floyd was not “murdered.” We all recall that state-run media claimed the looting-and-shooting riots were “mostly peaceful.” But nobody ever really believed that, especially after watching the city absolutely trashed on live TV. And they certainly don’t believe it now.

It’s just that times have changed. Back in those days, Monica Cannon-Grant was lionized by the credulous trust-funders of the Globe and dying unread monthly magazines. Now the owner of the local BLM franchise is under a federal indictment (no state charges of course, because Maura doesn’t do cases that might embarrass Democrats).

Maura made her power-to-the-people speech days after lawless mobs of shiftless leftist lunatics shot up police cars on Tremont Street, fired into occupied buildings across from the Common, looted stores in Copley Place and broke windows and generally vandalized buildings up and down Boylston and Newbury streets, from the Public Garden all the way to Massachusetts Avenue.

It wasn’t looting, though, it was just undocumented shopping. Reparations on the fly. Millions upon millions of dollars in damage, attempted murder of cops, and Maura celebrated it all with absolute glee by saying “that’s how forests grow.”

I guess her comments were … taken out of context, as the Democrats always put it. That’s not who she is, they also say. If anyone was offended blah-blah-blah … .

And of course you know what the local Republicans are doing with this mea culpa.

They’re pouncing! They’re weaponizing! They’re seizing!

This itsy-bitsy apology got me wondering if Maura regrets anything else she’s said over the last eight years.

For instance, Maura is a big, big supporter of transgender rights. Back in 2016, there was a so-called bathroom bill pending in the Legislature, and Maura of course was rabidly in favor of allowing men — excuse me, trans-women — to loiter and lurk in ladies’ restrooms.

Given the number of heinous crimes that have been committed by these, uh, self-identifying women, both in Massachusetts and nationwide, some of the witnesses at the hearing were concerned about safety issues.

Maura Healey, who is accompanied by a State Police detail wherever she goes, was appalled at this bigotry, this transphobia.

“If you’ve got that much of a problem,” Maura hissed at the deplorables, “hold it!”

To this day, some people still call Maura “Hold It!” Healey.

Then there’s the sordid case of Sonja Farak, the jailbird ex-state chemist whose falsified drug-lab tests railroaded hundreds of defendants, many of them nonwhite, into prison.

Maura Healey and her predecessor, Martha Coakley, tried to cover up the scandal — don’t take my word for it, Superior Court Judge Richard Carey wrote a scathing 127-page opinion of what he described as the attorney general’s handling of the racist frame-ups — “a depth of deceptiveness that constitutes a fraud upon the court.”

I know I’ve talked about this before, but the other day, Maura tried to explain away her incendiary, irresponsible rhetoric from 2020 by saying that she was merely acknowledging how her office had fallen short, as the magazine put it, in addressing the “systematic racism” in the U.S.

Judge Carey outlined how at one point, Healey’s office tried to broom a grand-jury report on the commonwealth’s staggering corruption by filing a “Motion to Impound Grand Jury Materials and Report.”

Then Healey’s office filed a second motion “to impound its request for its motion of Non-Dissemination of Information.”

So Maura wanted to cover up her request to cover up the attempt to hide the evidence of the framing of defendants of color.

Does Maura … regret any of that? Apparently no one has ever bothered to ask her. It would be lese majeste.

Just like recently, when Gov. Charlie Baker went on local NPR — National Panhandler Radio — and made an amazing admission about his calamitous handling of the Panic.

“What really got us out of COVID wasn’t rules and regulations and requirements and orders, okay?”

Now he tells us, after his idiotic stewardship utterly destroyed the state’s economy. He just tosses it out, that all of his idiotic diktats were for naught.

“It was vaccines, right, built off of years of people studying and figuring out how to do mNRA.”

Actually, it’s called mRNA. But Gov. Know-It-All even bollixed that. And by the way, it doesn’t seem the vaccines worked all that well anyway. But I guess he’d rather talk about mNRA or mRNA than about the Orange Line or the Green Line.

Just like Maura Healey, no one in what was once the Boston media ever calls him out for his asinine comments.

That’s how forests burn down, and cities, and rapid-transit lines. And nobody around here ever pulls the fire alarm.