Paul McMorrow – Snappy Title TK TK

So yeah, it’s been a month since this website saw any action. Blame work, parenthood, freelance work, beer, vacations, and for-sale houses with unforeseen structural problems.

Here’s what you all missed: Almost bought a house, until we didn’t.

Also, brewed a big hoppy American Red Ale, dubbed Dirty Water Red after that MWRA filth that was happening the day it was brewed. It’s brewed with Crystal 90L and Carafa Special II, hopped with Amarillo and Cascade, and then dry-hopped with more Cascade. Sort of an homage to a ton of great beers I had in Portland last year, as well as Ithaca Cascazilla, which exists because we can’t get any of those beers out east.

Some news happened as well. Brian McGrory went back to the well, to great effect. Eddie Kelly found a new way to infuriate Hizzoner – by actually bending a little. And Dianne Wilkerson admitted the evil racist feds actually had something on her after all.

One last kick at that last one. Adrian Walker’s Wilkerson career obit today lays some good groundwork, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The point isn’t just that she was a filthy crook (feels good to finally drop the allegedly! there), because we’ve got more than our fill of filthy crooks here. Nor is it good enough that she was a tragic figure, Roxbury’s answer to one of Aristotle’s schmucks. Wilkerson’s downfall is important because it should put to rest a uniquely nasty and poisonous vein running through Boston politics.

Yes, as Walker points out, Wilkerson was skilled in taking care of her constituents when she wasn’t shaking them down. That wasn’t the only reason for her unusual staying power, though. She owes that to her particular skill at manipulating the politics of race – in a town where old racial wounds can reopen easily – for her own personal advancement. She did it when the AG had her over a barrel, and again when she was getting it taken to her by a better, less cynical candidate. She got paid for it when pressuring the city for that liquor license she wanted.

She had herself redistricted into wealthy white neighborhoods to up her access to money and development action, but every time she was cornered, she didn’t just point the finger away from herself; she surrounded herself by a phalanxes of people who looked like her, and asked them to believe that her own problems were also their own. After pleading guilty, that game is finally over.