GRANITE STATE GOOBERNATORIAL

Governor “Crazy Chris” Sununu

State House
107 North Main Street
Concord, NH 03301

Dear Crazy:

I know you won’t mind the disparaging nickname; this is a favorite vehicle of your hero in the White house: insulting and belittling anyone who won’t get in his lying locksteps.

Similarly, I’m sure you’ll appreciate my rendering of your image (I did the same for Trump). When your interior actions are ugly, distorted and deceitful, your exterior should reflect that.)

But, I’m writing re: Your recent comments during a Fox interview:

Shame on you.

It’s never a surprise to me when members of your Party favor the interests of the privileged and powerful versus “the little guy” (usually with a degree of meanness that beggars explanation), so the apparent glee you expressed when you told your Fox “interviewer” that you “couldn’t wait” to veto the Paid Family Leave bill … well … that’s par for the course. Mean. Gutless.

Lest you forget (because Me The People won’t): when running for governor, you were asked in a debate if you supported paid family leave, you said “Absolutely.” Liar. (Yes, yes, yes, I’m sure we took your “absolutely” out of context. Bullpuckey. You lied.)

You supported Trump’s pulling us out of Paris Climate Accord. You refused to join other governors in the bipartisan US Climate Alliance. You have visited the Trump White House more than any other governor. Political toady.

And, speaking of guts, I also take great exception to your comment that Donald Trump will win in New Hampshire because he appeals to the voters here “on a gut level.”

Wrong-headed, asinine, and you certainly don’t speak for me.

Yes, I do indeed have a visceral reaction to the criminal who currently occupies our White House, but it’s on a level that reeks of revulsion. As a native Granite Stater, I’m ashamed, embarrassed, and disgusted that you occupy our State House.

It’s stunning to me that anyone who can think critically, or who can think at all, for that matter, supports this lying, despicable wretch we have as a president. This is the most puzzling: clearly you’re not “crazy,” but your actions are. In the end, I don’t make the distinction. Crazy is as crazy does.

As a man, a father, a husband? Do you have no moral compass? No sense of what’s decent, fair and just?

-- As a man, apparently, it’s okay with you to mock the disabled, ridicule the parents of a fallen soldier, dishonor a true American hero’s (John McCain) sacrifice and suffering for his country? You admire a man who said that his struggle to avoid getting a sexually transmitted disease was his "personal Vietnam"? Seriously? That’s beyond insulting. It’s the mark of an arrogant, sniveling coward.

-- As a father, apparently, it’s okay with you to support a degenerate who called his daughter “hot,” and said that if she wasn’t his daughter, he’d be dating her. That doesn’t bother you? Would you say (or even think) such a thing about your own child?

You’re not disturbed that children and babies are wrenched from their parents’ arms --- parents who are desperate for help and who come here hoping to protect those children from certain harm? What is WRONG with you? What are YOU made of?

--And, as a husband, apparently, you’d have no problem if I greeted your wife by grabbing her in the crotch? This is the example you set for your sons? Is that how you want them to grow up in this world? Objectifying and disrespecting and in fact assaulting women like that?

HOW can ANYONE support a Donald Trump without being of this same ilk? In my book, that makes you one sorry human being, and just plain creepy. And THAT, sir, is MY New Hampshire gut level.

Shame, shame, shame on you.

In the future, should you elect to seek reelection, I’ll be doing whatever I can to support your opponent and to see that you return to (a disgraced) civilian life.

Update: Yes, you’ve just announced that you’re running for governor again. Here we go!

And, just for some seriocomic aside, I especially liked how gave yourself a $22,000 pay raise the day after you took office. That’s 18% more than your female predecessor. A true Republican.

Even seriously funnier, you’ve claimed that you worked for eight years in California as “an environmental engineer.” Lie. You never earned a professional engineer’s license in any state. You had an EIT (engineer-in-training) certificate. You were a subordinate, supervised employee. Amazing how all you guys make things up.

Perhaps I should say, you don’t lie, it’s just how you take yourselves out of context.

B. Elwin Sherman

New Hampshire Native, Resident, Voter

Registered Independent

Honorably-Discharged Marine Veteran

UPDATE: 07/09/2019  Now comes news that at an auction/GOP fundraiser, you jokingly offered a copy of your Paid Family Leave bill veto to the highest bidder, adding that from now on you'll just "veto everything." Good work, Crazy Chris. You think that's funny? All it does it continue to show you up as elitist, ugly, and mean-spirited.

UPDATE: 07/22/2019 In the give-credit where it's due department, I see where you've done the right and true thing by signing SB142, the "period poverty bill," into law. Frankly, I'm shocked, given the fact that nearly every New Hampshire Republican voted against it, and nearly every Democrat for it. Even your words are stupefying.

This bill requires that all public schools provide free menstrual products -- tampons and pads -- to students at no cost.

And, you signed it.

And, you said this: “This legislation is about equality and dignity. SB 142 will help ensure young women in New Hampshire public schools will have the freedom to learn without disruption ― and free of shame, or fear of stigma.”

Almost unbelievable, given your misguided and baffling allegiance to our current misogynistic sexual predator-in-chief, and the fact that almost all your fellow GOP'ers held against it. WHY?  I don't trust your motives, and I'll never understand them. WHY? As I've noted in the above posts, you are all (typically) elitist, ugly, mean-spirited and just plain creepy. WHY?

But, in the end, I don't care. You did the right thing; you said the right thing, and a good thing happened for our young students. Congratulations, Crazy.

UPDATE: 08/10/2019  There you go again, Crazy Chris:

Veto: A bill that would require a 3-day waiting period before the purchase & delivery of a firearm.
Veto: A bill which closes the so-called gun show loophole and requires background checks for virtually all commercial firearms sales or transfers.
Veto: A bill that prohibits carrying a firearm on school property.

Again, we see who owns you and your Party cohorts (though I really want to mean conspirators).

Next time someone gets a gun who shouldn't have, next time someone shoots up a school, I will personally consider you an accessory to the murder, mayhem and madness that you seem hellbent to perpetuate. You say you want to protect our "individual freedom"?

You might start by protecting our lives.

UPDATE: 09/08/2019  "Sununu Vetoes Bill To Expand Absentee Voting."  Yep, there you go again, And, you are now the vetoing-est Governor in NH history.  You and your Party know that making voting easier and open insures that Democrats will win.  This is how YOU win: You cheat. Lie. Steal. Great parenting skills (of course, your support for the wretched POS in the White House tells us all we need to know about you as a father.) What a sorry legacy to leave: Cheater. Liar. Stealer. Crazy Chris. As a New Hampshirean, I apologize for you every day.

ON YOUR BIRD, GET SET ...

EVERYONE should have a pigeon head, Quaker Oats, compression stockings, a comfy chair and Harley-wear on their birthday, I always say. Thanks to all for your visits and support of the art(s)!

El

POETRY BREAK -- "The Comparison Study"

THE COMPARISON STUDY

How else could she say it with appropriate fuego?

Until their passions met,

she’d never loved and laughed so hard,

so soft, or felt so adored and amused.

But, yesterday he asked her:

"Do you love raisins as much as I do?"

That sent her into an existential tailspin,

wondering again if she could ever again

know another man’s love without comparing it

to what she’d put into
and taken out of her affairs with others.

She must allow it instead to float free,

without judgment.

The quiet and gentle, the passionate and sensual,

the tough and gnarly, the fun and exuberant.

That’s how she answered him.

But, today he hit her with another one:

“Is it hot in here, or is it me?” 

“It’s you,” she immediately replied,

sick of all his endless introspection,

and it wasn’t well-received.

Not the answer he’d wanted.

He’d wanted a flopsweat camaraderie.

She’ll now put it to her readers:

“Do you love raisins as much as I do?”

She can only hope you love poems

ending with grapes.

----

From "THE DIOECIANS -- His And Her Love". Copyright 2017 B. Elwin Sherman. Used here with permission. 

FUNNY AS CANCER

  

   Without researching it, I’ll bet that cancer in Colorado is no funnier than cancer in New Hampshire, but I can only speak for the Granite State and my lung tumor.

   Google reveals that no one living here has ever said: “as funny as cancer in New Hampshire.” That’s why I must say it now, living and writing as your native nurse humorist-tumorist.

    The ER doc unceremoniously said: “You have a mass on your lung.” With an inspired aplomb that only a New Englander would appreciate, I said: “I’m assuming you don’t mean Massachusetts.”

   Bang. Pow. Zoom. (I’m reserving exclamation points for the first finale of my second act, and that’s my first living with cancer in New Hampshire inside joke).

   When I heard my diagnosis, the words “Live Free or Die” shifted from the affairs of my state to my state of affairs, and immediately became my adopted up close and personal motto. I felt like a rock-tumbled Old Man of the Valley as an internal voice interrupted my shock: “Wait. Could you spare a minute for mortality?” Why, yes, I could but---

   Funny as cancer?

   My training and thirty-five-year career as a bedside care nurse taught me that humor is as essential to healing as not getting there is from here.

   I had cancer, so I did what only a New Hampshirite would do: started a wicked pissah cancer blog, made a Fluffernutter and washed it down with a frappe. Massachusettsans will claim the latter as theirs, but they do things like that.

   I then began searching my muse for the lighter side of what I knew would be hauling a heavy load down a long road.

   I’ve attended many patients with cancer, so I know the lie of its rugged landscape and many perils. But, when it’s MY trip as amateur pilot, not professional navigator? Funny as cancer? Here, in a state where freedom or death is a mandate?

   Yes. Especially here.

   First chore? Name my tumor. Men do this. We personalize our body parts and functions, errant and otherwise, and women will never understand it, beginning with the otherwise devoted wife lying next to me. She thinks it’s weird.

   I needed both radiation and chemotherapy, so I came up with “Rad Chemo.” Great moniker for a body-ambushing villain, and it kept with our New Hampshire tradition of seriously naming funny locales:

   My sympathies and apologies to the residents of Effingham, who undoubtedly live with a year-round tongue-in-cheek at the ready for any inquiring tourists. Effingham has always sounded to me like something expletively done to a ham.

   Or, when you think Kanca, is it suffixed with Mangus or Magus? Forever funny, and even we can’t decide.

   I was also inspired by other typically New Hampshire seriously funny things: Squirrel-proof birdfeeders (ha!), no-see-ums, wearing shorts with winter coats, and no-faultlessly driving unlicensed but self-designated road-legal snowmobiles, golf carts and riding mowers to the winter carnivals.

When I began my radiation, I found the spirit of our White Mountain State humor alive and free at Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital, when they snugged me up and into my treatment table mold with Rad Chemo. I felt like a human skewer hosting a hitchhiking saboteur kabob on a stationary spit as the linear accelerator rotated around us.

   The “Radionettes” (the techs I’d so-dubbed because they knew my musical likes and dark sense of humor), played “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” through the overhead speakers.

 No, you can’t, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what we need.

----
Illustration by Brad Fitzpatrick. All rights reserved. Used here with permission.

This column is appearing in the February 2019 issue of New Hampshire Magazine.

Senior Wire News Service Syndicated Humor Columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes from Bethlehem, NH. He is an author, humorist, agony uncle columnist and poet. His latest book is “THE DIOECIANS – His and Her Love“. Copyright 2019. All rights reserved. Used here with permission.

B. ELWIN SHERMAN -- AS TIME GOES BY

Sometimes, it's about the music. When I got cancer this year, I took up with the keyboard again after years of neglect. As I reorient to reading and muscle memory, I've been clunking along with some of my favorites. I'm a sucker for the iconic jazz/pop Classics. If you can hear past my wannabe piano bar/tip jar mindset and stumbly treatments, I'll keep practicing. Enjoy!

 

For my Dad, Alger Sherman: piano barman extraordinaire,
 who could play everything. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, and to all a good ride!

Love, El and Di, son Gabe, and dahlin' daughter Erin Lovett Sherman and grandsons Myles and Bodhi!

BUILDING A WINTER FALL

I’m not here to debate changes in the global environment. Let’s just say that this past spring was the first time I can remember riding the Harley in 80-degree weather, and the following week I was mowing the lawn, and the week after that I was shoveling 14 inches of snow.

     Not really that unusual for New Hampshire, where “nine months of winter and three months of poor tobogganing” has long been the mantra.

     That does bring us to what we won’t debate: the difference between weather and climate. We can all agree that weather is the six inches of partly cloudy in our basements, and climate is when it’s in our attics.

     Those of us who began as children and stubbornly refuse to give up those origins, all have stories about the “normal” outdoor seasonal conditions when we were kids. “When I was a kid,” I would say, “the snowbanks were up to the window sills.”

     “When you were a kid,” my mother reminded me, “you never came out of the basement.” Funny, because I remember it as the attic.

     There was once a TV show called “The Imploders.” For me and my off-season sense of humor, this may have been the most unintentionally hilarious reality program ever produced, as I watched a family of “demolition experts” travel around the country and “bring down buildings.”

     They didn’t employ the usual bang-boom application used to pancake an obsolete structure, but rather the “tripping” method. Here, the building is weakened by cutting holes in it, (no one in the crew could agree on how many were needed) tying a cable to it and pulling it over. Simple enough. Right?

     The crew chief, whose knowledge of building-pulling was seemingly based on his frat house prank days of attempting to stuff a grand piano into an occupied shower stall, then said to the guy operating the building-puller: “Hey!  If she starts to go, get out of there!”

     (Warning: When someone needs to tell or be told this, they might need another year of postsecondary bathroom piano-stuffing before they start knocking down buildings using methods and forces that could … well … knock down a building.)

     They used this scientific method of wreckification on an old paper mill near here in the North Country, and we locals were there to watch the spectacle and re-live their attic-dwelling childhood roots.

     When the time came, I watched them give it a mighty non-explosive heave and, voila! It shuddered a little and stood there.  Someone, apparently, had forgotten to make the pressure-relieving cuts in the back, and the resulting tug was like trying to raise the Titanic with a Slinky.

     This is where I stand with weather forecasters and climate change experts. Their collective expertise alternately tells us that we’re either in for a light sprinkle or a re-enactment of Noah’s maiden voyage. This usually translates as a foot of snow.

     Who should we believe? Should we entrust our Icelandic retirement plans to an “expert” who says things like “inter-glacial warmth is driven by orbital mechanics”? Or, should we accept that if we wait long enough, we’ll be low & dry because of the old New England salt’s riposte, when asked if it will ever stop raining:

     “Always has.”

     One scientist says that “we should not stop breathing, even though it would be one of the most immediate steps to slow CO2 emissions.” I do love egghead humor, but I’m not convinced he was trying to be funny.

     Or, as the well-seasoned North Country sage would offer, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”

     I think I’m going with the time-tested building destructor’s code: “If she starts to go, get out of there!”

     I’m not sure where “there” will be, but if any of us hope to make it from here, we should pack up our umbrellas and our sunscreens and head way up northeast, just south of the western skyline.

     Either that, or it’s back to the winterized subterranean attics of long-past summers. 

* * * * *

Senior Wire News Service Syndicated Humor Columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes from Bethlehem, NH. He is an author, humorist, agony uncle columnist and poet. His latest book is “THE DIOECIANS – His and Her Love“. Copyright 2018. All rights reserved. Used here with permission.