Chuck takes a Turner for the pathetic

Chuck takes a Turner for the pathetic
By Joe Fitzgerald  |   Saturday, October 30, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Columnists

LET ME JUST SAY: City Councilor Chuck Turner faces the media outside Moakley Federal Courthouse.
Photo by Ted Fitzgerald

Let’s see if we have this straight.

First, Chuck Turner couldn’t remember a clandestine meeting with government witness Ron Wilburn, then couldn’t be certain of what Wilburn was slipping into his hand because it was a “minister’s handshake” they shared, and everyone knows clergymen always accept donations surreptitiously.

That was Turner’s story and he was sticking with it.

As Al Smith once quipped, dismissing the plausibility of an explanation offered by his opponent, Herbert Hoover, “No matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.”

Chuck, don’t you know that cameras don’t lie, and that all ministers aren’t shady, which was an unconscionable implication, even by your shallow standards?

Did it never occur to you that most people are receptive to remorse, willing to ponder forgiving anyone honest enough to say, “I was wrong; my fault; no excuse; I apologize”?

It’s called taking the high road, which is the quickest way to put a mess like this behind you.

Instead, in your arrogance, you assume most of us are too dense to be offended or too preoccupied to care.

And then you dare to employ the Richard Pryor defense.

When the late, great comic portrayed a cheating husband who had been caught in flagrante delicto by his wife, who was about to read him the riot act, he pleaded, “Baby, who are you gonna believe? Me? Or your lying eyes?”

It was funny when Pryor said it.

But, Chuck, coming from you, it’s pathetic.

Early in his career, Jim Rice got into a brouhaha with Bob Lobel after the latter quoted him as saying the Sox didn’t have much of a chance.

“It was down in Winter Haven,” Lobel recalled. “Everyone sensed we were in for a long season, and now here was the ace outfielder pretty much saying it, too. And he said it on camera! When he started catching heat he claimed he had been misquoted, so we played the tape and said, ‘C’mon, Jim, here it is.’

“But in fairness to Rice, he was still young, and probably didn’t remember the exact words he had used until they came back to bite him. Sometimes what you mean can come out sounding a lot different, depending on how you say it.”

Turner’s words, however, were diabolically chosen.

No matter what your lying eyes thought they saw as a wad of something was slipped into a “minister’s handshake,” he remembers nothing, and if you can’t live with that, you must be a racist.

No, Chuck, people who’ve fin- ally had their fill of you are called realists.

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