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Managing Editor Scott Wright has been with The Post
since 1998. He is Red-hot boiled potatoes no more! By Scott Wright When I was a little kid, my brother and I used to spend weekends in the summertime with our maternal grandparents. An entire day of frolicking along the banks of Little River was hard to top when I was 10 and Cory was 8. Still, there were Sunday mornings we'd wake up wishing for just enough rain to make it too wet to play outside because we loved for Gran to read us a story. And it was always the same story.We would pile onto the couch and Gran, a dedicated postal deliverer and tobacco spitter, would plop down between us, a ragged collection of short stories in his hands. The hard-cover book was ripped and ragged, already coming apart in a hundred places the first time I ever laid eyes on it. And it must have held at least that number of hilarious tales. Still, we always begged for the same one. And he never once begged off. Gran must have read “The Ransom of Red Chief” often enough to have it completely memorized by the time he died in 1983. (Philoprogenitiveness was especially strong in that particular semi-rural community, I reckon.) I've probably mentioned “The Ransom of Red Chief” and my love of it a dozen times in this column over the years. But its tale of bumbling, conniving flim-flammers and their abrupt come-uppance seem to hit home over and over again anymore, as if O. Henry (real name William Sydney Porter) was somehow able to look forward almost exactly a hundred years and look directly into the George W. Bush-occupied Oval Office. If Porter was still penning parodies today, he'd massage his temples over all the lies and laugh his teeth out at all the tomfoolery, and probably make a fortune making fun of that room full of clowns. At last, after eight years of incompetence, it's time for this White House and the Republican Party it rode in on to receive its come-uppance. As much as I love “The Ransom of Red Chief,” I'm tired of watching the GOP mimic the ineptitude of Sam and his partner in crime Bill Driscoll on the evening news night after night after night: I'm weary of the misguided war in Iraq; I'm calloused by a Congress that abdicated its constitutional responsibilities for six years while Bush, Cheney and their minions used fear and lies to strip away our freedoms; and I'm 100 percent fed up with a federal government that wants to bail out big business by using our tax money, just to make sure those fat cats get to keep their condos in the Caribbean. George W. Bush has spent eight years putting red-boiled potatoes down the backs of the American people and then mashing them with his foot; I for one don't want four more years of it. I would have voted for John McCain in 2000, if I could have. But he is no longer the man he once was. He's a flip-flopper, a desperate man whose willing to say anything to win your vote. If you've been watching Fox News Channel so long that you're unable to ascertain these facts for yourself, I will begin the process of reversing the brain-washing you've endured in my next column. |