Billy the Delusional Bully

The Fortnightly Rant for May 20, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 17, posted on Wednesday, June 8, 2011.

New Hampshire Democrats are liars, according to House Speaker William O’Brien.

Addressing the Seacoast Republican Women at the Elks Club on Monday morning, the Speaker said, “When … the facts don’t agree with their rhetoric, the Democrats invent. They lie about our motives, and our actions. They fabricate about what’s going on in the legislative process, they lie about legislative bullying.”

The credibility of the Speaker’s own statements might best be judged by what he went on to say next:

“They lie about a President — and we’ve seen this — being an intellectual lightweight when the person that they put forward had a lesser academic career.” *

Unlike the libels O’Brien had just aimed at un-named Democrats, his statement about the academic achievements of two Presidents can be verified easily — or debunked.

We’re assuming here that O’Brien is referring to George W. Bush and Barack Obama. If he’s not, then he’s even further off base than we think.

Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. That, according to the late Dean Barnett, is “one honor you unquestionably had to earn.” And Dean Barnett was hardly biased in favor of Democrats. His article containing that assessment was published by The Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes.

George W. Bush spoke at Yale, his alma mater, in May of 2001. “The President,” according to one news story, “acknowledged that he was known here for so-so grades and a lively social life.” The story quoted him saying: “If you’re like me, you won’t remember everything you did here. That can be a good thing.” Was Bush misquoted by the dreaded liberal media? Unlikely — the AP story containing that quote was published by Fox News.

O’Brien’s judgment on Bush and Obama was wrong — dead wrong, completely wrong, one hundred and eighty degrees wrong — but he delivered it with a display of assurance that a Pope might well envy. The utterly determined wrong-headedness of his speech on Monday fits seamlessly with his tenure as Speaker. It has been like watching a man fixing a watch with a sledgehammer.

O’Brien could be the poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. This depressingly useful concept describes the process in which incompetent persons will often “reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

Speaker O’Brien’s political understanding is so incompetent that he consistently takes the most extreme positions imaginable on every issue that comes before him, insisting all the while that he’s just displaying good old centrist New Hampshire common sense.

Done with defaming Democrats, at least for the moment, O’Brien told the Republican women, “We have a choice. We can get caught up in believing in the Democratic stories, or being intimidated by them, or we can stand proud as Republicans and continue to pursue Republican solutions based on traditional American values, and know that despite the yelling, the screaming, and the stories, the people are with us.” [Emphasis added.]

Well … not exactly.

The day after O’Brien’s visit to Portsmouth, a special election was held to fill a vacant House seat in Hillsborough County’s 4th District. The incumbent, Robert Mead, a Republican from Mont Vernon, had resigned to work full-time as Chief of Staff for Speaker O’Brien. The Republican candidate was Peter Kucmas, of New Boston. The Democratic candidate was Jennifer Daler of Temple.

Prior to the election, O’Brien said that it would be a referendum on him. He had some reason to be confident — Hillsborough’s 4th is supposed to be the 16th most Republican district out of 103 statewide. Andrew Hemingway, the Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, referring to the Daler/Kucmas matchup, warned his members that “[i]f the progressives pull off a victory, they will claim that this is a repudiation of the Republican agenda, and it will be seen as a direct hit to Speaker O’Brien and the cause of liberty.”

Oops. Jennifer Daler didn’t just win, she crushed Kucmas — and, by implication, O’Brien. She took 59 percent of the vote and swept all five towns in the district — including Mont Vernon, O’Brien’s own home town.

NHJournal.com, a Conservative news website with pretensions to bipartisanship, quoted state GOP chairman Jack Kimball on the results. “Unfortunately special elections have a lower voter turnout and I am disappointed with the outcome.”

Kimball is right in a general sort of way. Special elections generally do have lower turnouts.

Not this time, though. Despite the cold, wet weather more than 20 percent of eligible voters went to the polls on Tuesday. According to Kimball’s Democratic counterpart, Ray Buckley, that “far exceed[s] the turnout in any previous special election for state Representative in New Hampshire history.”

O’Brien and Kimball appear to be equally delusional. We’ll say this for NHJournal — it was reality-based enough to illustrate its post-mortem of the election with a photo of a dead baby elephant covered by a tarp.

* The quotation is transcribed from a video posted on Facebook by “Portsmouth NH Patch,” titled “House Speaker William O’Brien Lauds Legislature’s Accomplishments.”