Circus comes to City Hall
The television stations treating every snowstorm like it's the apocalypse used to be funny. Now it's just stupid. But we do need to be entertained during the bleak midwinter, so in this season of giving, let's give it up for City Councilor Chuck Turner, the gift that just keeps on giving.
Comrade Chuck, who, at last check, is the only city councilor who tries to look like Ho Chi Minh, has gone on the offensive to rebut the FBI's accusations that he took a $1,000 bribe to grease the skids for a liquor license.
Last week, Comrade Chuck and former US attorney general Ramsey Clark stood shoulder to shoulder at an old-fashioned loony-lefty demonstration outside the Kennedy Building. Comrade Chuck's apparatchiks handed out manifestos saying Clark supported the people's demand that the government "drop the racist frame-up." Clark called the prosecution of Comrade Chuck politically and racially motivated and said all sorts of nasty things about our fine US attorney, Michael Sullivan.
Funny. Clark wasn't always so cozy with radicals who congregated on City Hall Plaza. Forty years ago, when he was attorney general, he presided over the prosecution of the Boston Five, a group of pacifist antiwar protesters that included Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor.
But something happened between City Hall Plaza in 1968 and City Hall Plaza 2008. Ramsey Clark went, as the lawyers might put it, cuckoo.
Let's recap some of our esteemed former AG's former clients. There were those two Nazi concentration camp guards. And then there was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical Muslim cleric who orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. And who can forget the Genocide Twins, Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, who did for Serbs what Hitler did for Austrians. I won't even mention Saddam Hussein.
Memo to Comrade Chuck: Did you ever notice that everybody Ramsey Clark sticks up for ends up in the can?
When Clark shows up in your corner, that usually means the words "Guilty, your honor" are right around the bend.
Ramsey Clark, who was once sworn to uphold the Constitution, had little to say on Comrade Chuck's recent plan to suspend the First Amendment. Comrade Chuck doesn't like the fact that some newspaper columnists have suggested, after viewing the tape of him scoffing a wad of cash from an FBI informant, that he may be, um, ethically challenged.
Like any good pinko, Comrade Chuck's solution to this exercise of free speech is to use the government to ban it. This time, the revolution really will not be televised.
Of course, it doesn't strike Comrade Chuck as slightly hypocritical that he, the guy who held a press conference to show pornography he bogusly claimed was evidence of US troops raping Iraqi women, would be trying to limit free speech.
Frankly, it's disappointing to see the nation's former attorney general waste his time in Boston. Ramsey Clark should be in Baghdad, securing the release of Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who winged his shoes at President Bush. Then he could spirit Zeidi back to Boston and have him shoe some selected pols.
Starting with Comrade Chuck. Chuck could use a Dr. Scholls in the puss, if only to shut him up for a minute. Then maybe a Hush Puppie for our reform-minded governor, who just turned the state's Third World transportation system over to a Big Dig hack. How about a
And, finally, a wing-tip right in the schnozz of the biggest bookie in the state, Treasurer Tim Cahill, who has managed to redecorate the Lottery office, cut aid to cities and towns, and still entice scratch ticket junkies to gamble away the Christmas gift money.
In this joyous season, there are just so many deserving and simply not enough shoes to go around.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com 