Frank Guinta's head hosts a plethora of small sins, and a few large ones. I won't run too close to a lawsuit, but I've long held in semi-confidence why he hates all those taverns and their pretty, pretty waitresses.
But unlike his predecessors, Frank's peccadilloes tend towards the personal. He has weaknesses. But I doubt if he ever took a payout from the Greek, Lebanese and Israeli gambling consortium, or staffed the bureaucracy with cronies, for dollars. He hasn't ever insured a historic mill that burned in a nifty and profitable fire. He didn't cook up the civic center white elephant and the sweet location which just happened to benefit not a few members of the Board of Mayor and Alderman.
Frank doesn't have the lean, mean look in his eye - because his political fortunes rest on the complacency of a willing and dwindling whitish middle class electorate, not on the mobbed up kleptocracy which has long run this shit town mill city cut in half by a poisoned river. Sure, he cried lawn order just as the West Indians, the Hispanics and the Haitians started to move into the city in larger numbers. Sure, he went after City Welfare as soon as the Sudanese, the Pakistanis and the Dominicans showed up on the rolls. Sure, the cops spend a whole lot of time, now, around their satellite offices in the two predominantly non-white neighborhoods.
But, when you count on French and Irish Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Lebanese Melkites for your political base - you have to worry the non-Christian and dark skinned outsiders, you know, for the public theater and whatnot.
White people need their fears confirmed, daily, or they stop buying shit and start listening to muses with groove.
So - when I read this today (in the HuffPo of all places, as if this makes for national news), it stank of a hatchet job. It stank of payback. Frank and his wife have a lot of ca-ching. She worked for Bezos. Bezos pays his management well. The Guintas pay for nannies and Frank's considerable girth, out of that ca-ching.
Still, Frank's enemies in the local GOP finally have their payback opportunity. Courtesy of the "liberal" HuffPo. Funny stuff, eh, Frank? Your Republican enemies went running to a liberal fashion rag. Heh.
Frank made one of those fatal errors. He did not calculate his political fortunes properly. He backed Giuliani, when the poobahs went for Romney. He went solo, when the panjandrums wanted a united front against hated Lynch, the "Jew Prosecutor*" and the cunningly boring and inoffensive Carol Shea-Porter. Sure, he's got some national backing - but here, where it counts, he's made some enemies of former allies.
But Frank's biggest crime, of course, has nothing to do with the machinations of state party politics. The problem for Frank? Frank doesn't do conservative conservatively enough. He doesn't hit that really strident note. He might even have tolerable opinions about abortion, stashed away behind his Catholic crusader shield. He doesn't whine about Jesus as often as he should. He doesn't embody a real hate for tolerance. He play acts the rough stuff. He might even understand that changing demographics change fate, or some such. He even has a few wacky libertarian ideas. I've heard him mutter them.
And for that, Frank, you will go through this ringer with barely a friend to help you. Perhaps, if you survive it, you'll get bold enough to do some damage. Or not. I don't really care.
* - overheard with mine own ears, one night in my restaurant, hosting some local Chamber types
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