Mary Easley’s lawyers’ press conference was a spectacle worth buying a ticket to see – except you could watch the whole show free on WRAL.
Most folks speak in plain English but Mrs. Easley’s lawyer thinks and speaks a foreign language called legalese – that in rare moments sounds like English.
The press conference barely got going good when, taking a deep breath and drawing himself up, the lawyer procliamed to the reporters that he not only had a Degree from Duke Law School but, on top of that, had a Doctor of Philosophy Degree from UNC and he’d not only taught at UNC and SMU but in Canada and, what’s more, his philosophical specialty was ethics – so he was a kind of expert. Then he proceeded to demonstrate what they teach as ethics in college must be pretty strange.
Just as bad for poor Mrs. Easley, he also figured the best thing for her to do at her press conference was stand there and keep her mouth shut. So she stood there beside Professor, Doctor, Attorney, Ethics Expert Marvin Schiller doing her best to smile for fifty-eight minutes as he droned on and on, lecturing the poor reporters about the ‘theatre of the absurd’ swirling around Mrs. Easley and pontificating about the ‘undisputed facts’ and how looking at the ‘undisputed facts’ through ‘the correct lens’ would prove to a blind man Mrs. Easley got her job because of her merits – and that being the Governor’s wife had nothing to do with it.
After that Mr. Schiller got down to the bottom line: Mrs. Easley’s got a contract with State College. There’s no way she’s going to resign. Period.
Years ago, Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner wrote three novels (The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion) about the rise of a strange – and mythic – clan down in Yoknapatawpha County Mississippi.
Flem Snopes left his home in the Mississippi hill country for the flat lands around Jefferson, Mississippi at the turn of the last century. Unburdened by scruples, blessed with devilish cunning and with an indomitable lust for hard cash when he arrived in town he got a job in a café as a cook – and in the blink of an eye owned the cafe.
Then he moved on to the water works where he could not just earn a salary (while not working) but supplement his income by stealing parts, like the brass valves on the boilers. After that a swarm of Snopes’ descended on Jefferson like a plague of locusts – then Flem figured out his real calling was banking and Jefferson, Mississippi was never the same.
It was just lucky for Mississippi Flem Snopes never thought of being Governor.
But Mike Easley did and his high jinx as governor are worthy of the fictional (and mythic) escapades of the Snopes.
First Easley put his ‘cousin’ McQueen Campbell on the Board of NC State University; then, between flying around in McQueen’s plane and making land deals, he stopped long enough to get cousin McQueen to pull a few strings for him.
It seems the Provost at State held his job as a ‘temporary’ appointment;—so (it looks like, even if it’s not a proven fact yet) Mike or McQueen offered to get that job made permanent if, in exchange, the Provost hired Mrs. Easley for $80,000 a year.
Next they waited until a respectable amount of time passed, went back to the Provost and suggested he double Mrs. Easley’s salary and, since Mike was about to leave office, give her a five year contract.
Everything went along fine for another year, until McQueen’s string pulling at State ended up on the front page.
That prompted the President of UNC, Erskine Bowles, to ask Mrs. Easley to resign. But that kind of thinking didn’t make anymore sense to Governor Easley than it would have, say, to Flem Snopes.
Now, the rest of us might as well face the hard truth: Mike Easley has outsmarted the whole state of North Carolina and getting that job – and $850,000 contract – away from him is going to be like prying a bone out of the jaws of a lion.
After all, that means taking on all the Easley ‘cousins’ still in office;—the legislature is just chock full of them and, down deep, they don’t see much wrong with Mike grabbing that job for his wife.
Governor Perdue more or less just rolled her eyes at the idea of a special prosecutor and Marc Basnight – the he-coon of the Senate – made even shorter-shrift of the idea of holding any hearings or investigations in his neck of the woods.
I‘ve got to admit to a sneaking admiration for Erskine Bowles – he was the first one to call on McQueen Campbell to resign; the first one to call on Mrs. Easley to resign; and I’ve got to give him credit – he’s stuck to his guns: Right after Mrs. Easley’s lawyers ethical broadside, without blinking ole Erskine called on her to resign again.
But the hard truth is if Erskine is going to tackle this pack of alligators alone – it may be like General Pickett’s charge. Wonderful – but bloody.
The only other person who’s stood up, besides Bowles, is Republican Phil Berger, who’s leading a one man crusade in the Senate to cut the funding for Mrs. Easley’s job – except the Democrats (who just cut everybody’s pay in state government) don’t see much sense in that.
So, in the end, it looks like we’re down to one last razor thin hope: A strange beast called a Grand Jury – which in plain English is a group of ordinary people who were unlucky enough to get themselves drafted onto a federal jury that is going to be sitting in a courtroom in Raleigh for the next six months trying to figure out what to do when a plague of Snopes descend on North Carolina.
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