GHOST OF CHARLIE BAKER IN HOLYOKE
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
If you don’t believe William Shakespeare, just ask Charlie Baker and his hack pal Bennett Walsh.
They’re not even dead, and yet their evil lives on… and on… and on.
Yesterday, Bennett Walsh was in court in Northampton, pleading guilty to negligence in the deaths of 76 veterans at the Holyoke Soldiers Home when he was superintendent there during COVID back in 2020.
Seventy-six people dead, and Walsh gets no jail time. It’s great to be a Democrat, isn’t it?
Walsh was incompetent, but let’s face it, he was a fall guy. He was just doing what hacks do, looking for a no-heavy-lifting job for $122,000 a year, behind which comes the pension.
I blame this fiasco more on the failed Republican governor Dementia Joe called “Charlie Parker.”
Walsh is now disgraced, but the fool who put him in position to kill 76 veterans has not been inconvenienced in the least by the catastrophe he created.
In fact, Charlie Parker is now running the NCAA, into the ground, for a cool $3.5 million a year.
Talk about failing upwards.
We all understand that Charlie Parker had 1,950 reasons for appointing Bennett Walsh to the job he had zero qualifications for — and all of them had George Washington’s portrait engraved on them.
Before the nationwide search, Walsh handed Baker $950, as well as another $1,000 to Baker’s lieutenant governor, Karyn “Pay to Play” Polito.
But that’s just the cost of doing business in the hackerama. The more embarrassing problem for Baker is, he flat-out lied about his relationship with Walsh after all the veterans died.
In June 2020, Baker denied even knowing Walsh.
“I can tell you,” he said at a news conference, “that the first time I ever met him or talked to him was when we swore him in.”
Baker couldn’t deny that, because his office had released a photograph of Baker with Walsh taken in the Corner Office.
It’s part of the rogue’s gallery of reprobates Charlie was snapped with, among them jailbird exrep David Nangle (Bureau of Prisons #01227-509) and thieving ex-Fall River mayor Jasiel Correia (BOP #01205-138).
But Baker denied ever speaking to Walsh before the swearing-in, right up to the moment he was confronted with logs proving that he had indeed spoken with him, for about a half hour.
“I forgot,” Baker lied. I wish I could forget… that Charlie Parker ever was ever the governor of Massachusetts.
But this is the hackerama, under both parties. Most of the payroll patriots who get jobs for whatever reason (contributions, DEI, blood relations, sleeping with the governor, etc.) don’t actually end up killing anyone.
But for some jobs, even in state government, you need to hire at least a semi-qualified candidate. Life and death jobs would fall under this category, or so it would seem.
Walsh comes from a hack Democrat family in Hampden County. His mother was on the Springfield School Committee. His uncle, William Bennett, was the longtime district attorney, succeeding a guy who used to pal around with local wise guys named Skyball and Big Nose and Baba.
Bennett retired in January 2011, and has since been collecting a kiss in the mail of $7,206 a month. But he took time out from his golden years to negotiate this wrist slap for his nephew.
At least since Bill Weld, the Republican playbook in Massachusetts has been to take care of old-line Democrat hack families in the big cities. In Boston it was the Connollys and the Flahertys, and later the McDermotts and the Goldens.
In Quincy, headquarters of the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the Republicans winked as the Newport Avenue offices were stuffed full of Quincy and Braintree Democrat layabouts.
Of course that didn’t work out so well for those seven ex-Marines who were killed up in the New Hampshire by an alien who should have had his MA driver’s license pulled.
In the Holyoke disaster, Walsh wasn’t the only patsy for the Parker-Polito administration. They’d put in a veterans’ secretary named Francisco Urena — a Lawrence guy, outreach to a different group of Democrats, ethnically and geographically.
Urena got whacked too. But there was a big civil lawsuit coming up, so he got parked at Mass Development as “deputy director of military initiatives.” Took a $29,000 pay cut, but any port in a storm.
Once the lawsuit was settled — for $56 million — and Charlie was safely ensconced in Indianapolis, Urena was gone from the state payroll.
Last I heard he had a job at the airport in Lawrence, and his old boss at MassDev, rotund exLawrence Mayor Dan Rivera, is said to be nosing around for a new sinecure at UMass.
Hey, Rivera used to work, if that’s the proper word, for Marty Meehan when the $684,917-ayear UMass president was a Congressman. Rivera started with Marty, now he can maybe finish with him. One thing we know for sure, none of these people are ever going to get a real job.
As Thomas Jefferson said of the federal bureaucracy more than 200 years ago:
“Vacancies by death are few, by resignation never.”
And vacancies by firing come even less often than by resignation. Unless 76 people die on your watch.
And even then, you don’t go to jail. Meanwhile, the soldiers’ home on the other side of the state, in Chelsea, is now being repurposed as a flophouse for illegal aliens.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s the hackerama. (Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)