Susan Collins is probably used to getting a lot of free advice from various people by now, many of whom may not necessarily mean her well. Take for instance Gordon Weil, a man whose very existence was unknown to me until a friend pointed out an op-ed he’d penned for the Bangor Daily News yesterday entitled “History calls on Susan Collins to rebuild the traditional Republican party.”
Weil’s words were evocative of the words of another sage, former U.S. president Joseph Robinette Biden who, in his feckless, single term in the White House, often mused about how the GOP is “not your daddy’s Republican party.” Like Biden, Weil is not a Republican, but he claims to have a memory of a distant, different world to which we’d all be wise to return.
Fresh off an unpleasant visit to Searsport where she went to announce federal funding for a long-overdue road reconstruction project but was instead assailed by angry Indivisible protestors (one of whom was evidently kvetching about having been fat-shamed), Maine’s senior senator was no doubt searching for anything to take her mind off the swarm of drug-addled ingrates in what was once a friendly town and surely alighted to news of her historic mission spelled out on the pages of the BDN.
“Indeed,” she must have thought, “this Weil fellow really gets it, the days of the Rockefeller Republicans are precisely what we need to save America from madness, I’d nearly forgotten about Olympia Snowe, Bill Cohen, John Chaffee, Bill Weld, Jim Jeffords and of course Nelson, but now Gordon has taken the time to remind me, I should send him a note of gratitude.”
Of course any op-ed runs the risk of being preachy and irrelevant, but it is the job of a sharp opinion page editor to parse the wheat from the chaff. Like Weil and Biden, I too have a memory and it is of the day when the Bangor paper ran thought-provoking op-eds penned by people who had some clue what they were talking about. ‘Here’s what you people really ought to be doing – you’re welcome very much.’
As if Gordon Weil’s scolding of Republicans and exhortations that a party to which he does not belong be steered by a senator he does not appear to support back to the sort of loyal opposition with which he was once more comfortable, on Thursday the editorial page team at the BDN ran another contribution from a Searsport protestor who fretted the media had done too little to broadcast his full range of discontent.
“Most of these comments didn’t make it into the tightly edited piece that (WABI) broadcast(ed),” retiree Rolf Olsen complained in the BDN’s latest expression of disapproval of Collins.
Fortunately for the outraged, at least one unionized newspaper is here to give him the platform the recently re-paved streets of Searsport did not adequately do.
The silliness at Pickering Square in Bangor is not restricted to voluntary contributions, now the editors themselves are getting in on the act. Witness a remarkable house editorial from last week:
Maine Voter ID Referendum is a Page from Putin’s Playbook, Maine’s second largest daily newspaper argued. That’s right, the petition that over 130,000 Mainers signed last year to put a question on this November’s ballot requiring voters to present ID at the polls to demonstrate they are who they say they are – as most every other democracy in the world requires – is a Russian authoritarian tactic.
Have we heard this claptrap anywhere else before? Hmmm. While the vast majority of Americans are pretty much over the Russia hoax, to the scribes at the BDN it must seem somehow like fresh material. If you don’t like something, call it Russian, disinformation or – if you’re really inspired – both. After all, that strategy worked so well in the past.
As the Washington Post, another declining newspaper that once had its time in the sun, used to opine on its masthead during the first Trump administration, “Democracy dies in darkness.” But mushrooms grow in darkness, as do funky ideas in the editorial department of the BDN. However, mushrooms, whether sautéed with butter or sliced and roasted on a pizza, can be useful, the ideas that grow fungus on the Bangor paper’s opinion pages are not.
Unless you really need a chuckle.
