Time for a regime change in Corner Office

It’s all starting to slip away from Gov. Charlie Parker, and you can see it at his interminable daily press conferences.

For a while there, he fancied himself the second coming of Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain. Now, he realizes, more and more of his constituents regard him as the next Rev. Jim Jones, ladling out the Kool-Aid here in his own personal Jonestown of New England.

He announced Tuesday that the “surge” was over. It would have been the perfect opportunity to mention relaxing some of the absurd indignities and contradictions he’s inflicted on the population, like having golf courses (sort of) open … and driving ranges closed.

But no. Tall Deval just can’t stop pushing people around.

“Wash your hands,” he says over and over and over again, sternly lecturing everyone who can’t afford to flee his tyrannical edicts. “Use face coverings. And don’t forget to wash your hands.”

Tall Deval always was a coat holder, but now the health care bureaucrats in the white lab coats have kidnapped his brain. He just keeps droning on about sectors and protocols and folks and following the data and “gradual careful data-driven phased re-openings” and, my favorite, “randomized testing for surveillance purposes.”

Can I get me some regime change here?

It’s getting very, very old. Maybe not if you’re a malingering hack at UMass or the courthouses in your third month of paid vacation. But not everybody has the kind of connections and do-re-mi you need to buy protection from Charlie’s dithering incompetence.

For instance, your average restaurateur isn’t as well-heeled as the nursing home operators who gave Tall Deval $52,000 so that he’d never utter a word about the fact that 62% of the dead are in the state-licensed facilities that they run so poorly and that he so obviously didn’t regulate properly.

Tuesday, a reporter finally asked him about the disgraceful mismanagement of his own Holyoke Soldiers’ Home.

All he could was mumble about the whitewash report that he has commissioned, to be written by a pal of his whom he fondly described as “Mark.”

It’s coming “reasonably soon,” the governor lied, and then added that until “Mark” has swept everything under the rug, er, completed his thorough investigation, he would be “uncomfortable speaking to the specifics.”

You have the right to remain silent, Gov. Parker.

Then his lieutenant governor, Karyn “Pay to Play” Polito, was asked about the weekend partying at her family’s Shrewsbury dacha on Lake Quinsigamond, which certainly seemed to be a violation of the stated policies of the Fourth Reich.

It was all her brother’s doing, she said.

It was graduation for a couple of her young relatives — forget the fact that there aren’t any graduations this year. Also never mind the fact that she just tweeted out orders to her subjects: “Only go out for essentials.”

Pay to Play just shrugged it all off:

“This is going to happen when people get together.”

In other words, do as we say, not as we do.

That whining voice of his — Tuesday, he couldn’t stop yapping about how great it was to get a haircut. All he had to do was wet his hair at home, sign an “attestation,” wear a mask — all this to fight a disease that has thus far taken the lives of 84 Massachusetts residents under the age of 50 (including none over the Memorial Day weekend).

He just keeps repeating the same crazy-ass numbers. In Lawrence Friday, he said, “We’re consistently at or around 10,000 tests a day or above that and we have the capacity to test up to 30,000 people a day.”

Sounds like too much capacity, right? No, he then went on about the “medium and long-term testing strategy,” and how he wants to gear up to “45,000 tests per day by the end of July and 75,000 tests per day by the end of December.”

Huh? If they won’t take the tests now, at the height of the media-driven panic, then why do we have to ramp up the capacity by another 250%?

“It would make us the largest testing per-capita entity in the world.”

Wow. He repeated all those numbers again yesterday at the State House. He might as well be wearing a white lab coat himself.

“Be careful,” he said in Lawrence, “be smart and respect the virus.”

He also said, “It’s very important for us to respect the power of this contagion and the virus.”

After which he said, 40 seconds later, “Respect the virus.”

He concluded, “Please be careful and respect the virus.”

I guess we know what his favorite Aretha Franklin song is, R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

One last thing: Don’t forget the “face coverings” – not masks, face coverings.

And wash your hands, children. We’ll go to the party at the Politos’ and in the meantime you will wash your hands!