For the week of August 14 - 20, 2002

Some still don’t get it

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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•  Baseball fans: despite boycott threats if players go on strike, count on this – fans will be right back in ball parks paying outrageous ticket prices, outrageous hot dog prices, outrageous souvenir prices and enriching owners and players who long ago discovered that fans are weaklings and suckers.

•  Senate Democrats: even while scolding corporate America about executive suite dishonesty, Senate Democrats only "severely admonished" Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-New Jersey, for accepting gifts and money from supporter David Chang, who went to prison for giving gifts that Torricelli accepted. Democrats seem more interested in retaining their slim margin of control rather than ridding their ranks of scoundrels and cheats.

•  Idaho Republican candidate Tom Luna: complaining on Boise TV that "we have enough liberals" in education, the GOP candidate for state education chief tried clumsily to make a campaign issue out of incumbent Superintendent Marilyn Howard borrowing a staffer from Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alan Blinken’s campaign while she joins a daughter at hospital bedside in the East. Luna forgets that Idaho’s public schools are at the mercy of a Republican Legislature that for 12 years has refused to act on a lawsuit to repair dilapidated schools and a conservative Republican governor and legislators who’re slashing school funds.

•  Massachusetts Dr. David C. Arndt: abandoning an anesthetized patient with open surgical incisions for 35 minutes so he could make a bank deposit, this is a physician who knows how to use a scalpel, but hasn’t the foggiest how to use judgment. Why is he still a licensed doctor?

•  Cardinal Bernard Law: having engineered the cover-up for criminal child molesters in the priesthood that has cost the church tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements, Boston’s aloof prelate rubs salt in the wounds of Catholics once again. He turned down a $10 million donation from the lay "Voice of Compassion" group with a feeble excuse about not wanting to interfere with the "pastoral relationship" of parishioners. This from a man who claims the Boston Diocese is almost broke from compensating victims of priestly molesters.

•  Transportation Security Administration: horror stories of bumbling airport screeners continue to provide jokes for Leno and Letterman. Consider the humiliations of Elizabeth McGarry and Colleen Carboy, lactating mothers carrying bottles of their own milk for newborn children. Screeners demanded they drink the milk to prove it was not some explosive liquid. McGarry complied and boarded her flight; Carboy refused, and was allowed to board. TSA says the screeners overstepped rules. No doubt, the screeners are still on the job waiting to bungle again.

•  Al Gore, former vice president: While coy about 2004 plans, Gore makes a fool of himself without help. First, he wrote a New York Times op-ed piece obliquely questioning whether elites such as George W. Bush believe they’re entitled to public office. Look who’s talking: Gore himself was born and bred to privilege as son of a distinguished U.S. senator, and now seems to feel he’s entitled to the presidency. Second, as if to reassure followers, he promised to reinvent himself if he runs again, abandoning polls and advisers and goofy fashion and speaking styles. Gore should reinvent himself as a retired politician.

 

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