WASHINGTON – Oh, such a clever boy is Mad Matt Bevin.
Cicadas, Peeping Tom, a strange and meandering 15-minute word salad where he manages to mention everything up to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping without addressing any of the serious questions that are sending his administration spiraling down the toilet.
What a card you are, Matty boy. You’re rich. What a lulu.
Over the past few weeks the governor has been doubling down on his efforts to denigrate the media and convince the public to reject reports raising eyebrows about his questionable financial dealings. He desires that folks listen only to him. And any inquiries liable to place him in a harsh light are strictly verboten.
In one Facebook blast, following his usual strategy of ignoring those who endeavor to hold him accountable, Bevin said “it is our option to disregard people that don’t take their responsibility seriously in our estimation. There’s only a handful of them. They make a lot of noise. They’re like cicadas.”
Mad Matt was at it again later in the week, telling reporters at an economic development press conference “You all are so breathlessly misinformed about things, trying to vilify people, make scapegoats of people. It’s hard for me to take you seriously when you are so remarkably lopsided in your coverage.”
It’s all so ludicrously transparent, as if our boy Matt is trying to establish his own Oceania with inconvenient facts disposed of via the memory hole.
What a ridiculous figure.
It’s like having Yosemite Sam as governor.
Here’s the thing: Matty Boy wants the good people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky to accept everything he says as gospel. Cancel those newspaper subscriptions, quit watching the evening news. Don’t even talk to your neighbor if you suspect he might be carrying impure thoughts about St. Matt.
Just check out his website and his constant swirl of tweets and he’ll tell you everything you need to know, the straight dope. No use worrying your pretty little head over what those silly newsmen say. Ignore the outside chatter, the sound of chirping cicadas, and (here it comes) trust me.
The problem is Matt Bevin presents only one side – his – and that side is untrustworthy. During the 2015 gubernatorial campaign he promised to release his tax returns should he prove victorious. Of course he immediately reneged, went back on his word, and you’re more likely to see Jimmy Hoffa drinking Pappy Van Winkle neat at the Old Seelbach Bar putting the moves on Daisy Buchanan than you are the governor’s tax returns.
So, yeah, he lied. But isn’t everyone is allowed one little fib, especially when its used to gain the trust of voters, even though you never have any intention of following through?
But his tax prevarication isn’t a solitary incident. During the summer of 2016, with Republicans closing in on a majority in the state House, Lying Matt tried to clinch the deal by approaching three Democratic lawmakers in an effort to convince them to switch sides. The three demurred. Rep. Russ Meyer, D-Nicholasville, one of those thus targeted, claimed the governor threatened him politically for refusing to come to heel.
Matty, the very essence of propriety, denied the claim. Unfortunately, Meyer kept the governor’s recorded message.
“I want you to be very aware of what the impact of those decisions will be as it relates to you, your seat, your district, etc., uh, just so that we have all the cards on the table,’’ Lying Matt was heard saying.
Now we have the Loftus incident.
Tom Loftus, whom I consider a close personal friend, has been the Frankfort bureau chief of the Courier-Journal of Louisville for about 30 years – longer than Mad Matt has resided in the state. He has been Kentucky’s top reporter for about that long. Questioning his integrity is akin to asserting the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun.
But of course that’s what our boy Matt did. Loftus has been vigorously writing about Bevin’s cut-rate purchase of a home in Anchorage from a political benefactor that has all the makings of a sweetheart deal. Matty Boy even refused, until last week, to acknowledge he was the purchaser of said abode which went for a fraction of the assessed value.
Looking into the purchase, Loftus sought to visit the manse and knock on the door – still not having confirmed that Bevin was the purchaser. He was greeted by a former member of the governor’s security detail who requested that he go no further. Loftus complied.
Fine. Reporters knock on doors every day. It’s called shoe leather journalism. At the old Kentucky Post, where both Loftus and I came of age, you tended to run through a lot of footwear. Sometimes you’re invited in, more often than not you’re told to vamoose, sometimes quickly. Loftus split without incident.
That was in March. Last Saturday, more than two months later, Mad Matt offered a tweet calling Loftus “a sick man’’ who “was caught sneaking around my home and property..Was removed by state police.’’ He ended this malicious message with the hashtag #PeepingTom.
Now Tom Loftus is, indeed, a sick man – he’s a dedicated fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes – but our poor little man of a governor chose, for no comprehensible reason, to describe what occurred months earlier by issuing one lie on top of the other as if it were a layer cake.
(I suppose this is the point in the column where I should be saying Loftus is twice the man Bevin is, but that would be damning Tom with faint praise).
Three’s the charm, folks. Three strikes and you’re out, to cite a few clichés. The good people of the commonwealth need to recognize their governor, the man asking them to trust him to the exclusion of all others, is a liar. Yet he’s plaintively begging voters to ignore those holding him to account, revealing his untruths, questionable deals and all-around ignorance, and listen only to him.
But here’s the secret. The Kentucky press doesn’t really need Mad Matt to take it seriously or acknowledge its existence. It will persevere regardless of the barriers he imposes
Uncle Joe Stalin couldn’t handle things any better. Let’s just change the commonwealth designation to the Kentucky Soviet Socialist Republic.
Apparently Mad Matt is working under the assumption that he and he alone is empowered to determine what constitutes news. Anything outside his self-imposed boundaries is irrelevant – fake news, someone might say. Inquiries that raise his hackles are deemed inconsequential. It’s just a coincidence that the issues he refuses to address are those that make him look like a money-grubbing hustler.
But here’s the secret. The Kentucky press doesn’t really need Mad Matt to take it seriously or acknowledge its existence. It will persevere regardless of the barriers he imposes.
Access to high government officials like the governor, to be blunt, is overrated, especially in dealing with a nitwit like Bevin. Governors generally answer questions in four ways – effusively when the answer makes them look good, evasively when the wicket is a bit sticky, silently, as in no comment, when jeopardy is perceptible, and finally, of course, there’s lying.
Bevin has chosen a combination of the final two paths, neither of which produce anything benefitting the public. Better to just go around him, as all fine journalists do, to get the goods. Do you think it was Mad Matt who told Loftus about his sweetheart house deal? Bevin probably thinks that, by not answering inquiries, the issue will simply go away. If so, he’s exhibiting phenomenal ignorance. Silence is a grudging acknowledgment, leading any reporter worth his or her salt to dig deeper.
Regardless, Mad Matt’s strategy is clear – convince the public to despise and ignore those who hold him accountable and persuade folks to follow him like so many lemmings. It could conceivably work. The water around journalism has been sullied for many, many years by those seeking to move voters toward their point of view by any means necessary. It has reached the point where many people willingly embrace an office holder they know is lying to them over those seeking to hold him or her responsible for his or her actions.
It’s unnerving to think that Kentuckians might come to value the unparsed claims of Mad Matt Bevin over those seeking to place those claims in context. But it could happen here.
You’ve probably heard Jim Bunning wasn’t always the easiest guy to get along with. Even during his Hall of Fame baseball career, the man they called “The Lizard’’ was one of those pitchers, like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale, who would occasionally plunk a batter just for the sport of it.
Bunning, who died May 26 at age 85, played politics the way he played baseball and, like a shot down the third base line, it could occasionally prove hot to handle. We got into a short shouting match on Election night 1983 when, as the Republican candidate for governor, he lost to Democrat Martha Layne Collins. Other scribes can report similar incidents.
But Bunning eventually made his way to Congress and two terms in the Senate and we made our peace. I accompanied him on a congressional trip to Nicaragua in the 1980s and he was a perfectly helpful and courteous gentleman. As Washington correspondent for the Kentucky Post we had a good relationship and he was open to discussing all sorts of things, reliably blunt and always truthful.
In other words, once you got to know him, Jim Bunning proved to be a decent guy. He had strong opinions. He also was thoroughly honest and open. That’s a good epitaph for anyone.
Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.