A Clerihew for Martha Coakley

I've long been a fan of an odd little verse form called the Clerihew. Named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, it consists of a pseudo biographical quatrain of two rhyming couplets. The lines are of uneven length and prose-like in rhythm. Bentley was a schoolboy chum and lifelong friend of G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton even illustrated many of Bentley's published Clerihews. Here's an example of one of Bentley's many Clerihews:

"I quite realized," said Columbus,
"That the earth was not a rhombus,
But I am a little annoyed
To find it an oblate spheroid."

Anyway, I was thinking about Martha Coakley and the remarkably inept campaign she has run for the US Senate seat of Massachusetts previously held by Ted Kennedy. Two months ago she had a 30+ percentage point lead in the polls over her Republican opponent, Scott Brown. And now the latest poll shows her trailing Brown by four points -- a truly extraordinary development for which she has only herself to blame. And so I wrote a Clerihew celebrating this fact...

Ms. Martha Coakley
Is no Annie Oakley.
It seems she can only shoot
Herself in the boot.

...and that's all I have to say.

Curt Schilling, Yankee Fan?

Until this morning I really didn't think that Republican Scott Brown had a chance to win Tuesday's senatorial special election in Massachusetts. But now? Well, all has changed. His opponent, Democrat Martha Coakley, has committed perhaps the one unforgivable sin in that great New England commonwealth: she publicly dissed retired Red Sox pitcher and 2004 World Series savior, Curt Schilling, by calling him a Yankee fan. This could lead to a major change in voting patterns. Many of those knee-jerk Democrat machine voters who normally vote a straight party line simply because...well, they've been told to do so, might find it more than difficult to vote for someone so ignorant of one of the true heroes of Red Sox Nation.

On his official blog, Schilling wrote, "I've been called a lot of things, but never, and I mean never, could anyone ever make the mistake of calling me a Yankee fan. Well, check that, if you didn’t know what the hell is going on in your own state maybe you could." You can listen to candidate Coakley's exact words below.



It's all very interesting.