In surfing lingo, it’s called a “point break” – a perfect wave that breaks so consistently it provides the surfer with a long, easy ride.
New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte’s point break has been Massachusetts-bashing. You know the drill – Massachusetts is a hellscape of insane far-left policymaking, overrun with crime and unchecked illegal immigration, an economic and social wasteland that serves as “a cautionary tale” for others. “Don’t Mass It Up” was her campaign slogan, and it seemed to work just fine, as it has in the past for other shallow, cynical New Hampshire pols.
Whenever Ayotte steps in something, she reaches for her political security blankie. But her latest grab for the comfort of New Hampshire’s inferiority complex doesn’t seem to be working so well.
Ayotte was humiliated earlier this month when she had to find out from the ACLU that ICE plans to buy and convert a 43-acre warehouse site in Merrimack into part of its planned network of concentration…er, “detention centers” for immigrants swept up in its crusade to meet insane Trump administration deportation quotas. That scheme had been disclosed in late December in a leak from the Department of Homeland Security, but Ayotte admits when she asked DHS and the White House about it, they blew her off.
Interesting.
Perhaps there is still Trump world animus toward Ayotte over the days when she denounced him as a sexist pig over his infamous 2016 Access Hollywood remarks. If so, all of her self-abasement since to make up for it has been for naught.
Maybe, after two presidential election losses and repeated defeats of Trump-endorsed congressional candidates, the president has given up on New Hampshire. That wouldn’t bode well for Ayotte’s re-election bid and GOP hopes of winning the Senate seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen.
Or could the disrespect of Ayotte and New Hampshire demonstrated in the Merrimack fiasco simply reflect the administration’s rank incompetence? Educated guess: it’s a combination of all of the above.
Meanwhile, the Merrimack gulag story is the gift to New Hampshire Democrats that keeps on giving. After being caught with her parka up over her head by disclosure of the ICE plan, Ayotte declared in her toughest don’t-bleep-with-me tone she had “made quite clear, both to the Department of Homeland Security as well as to the White House” that the “local voice was very, very important” in the siting process.
And while Ayotte refuses to take a firm stand on the siting, the local voices are speaking. Republican Merrimack State Rep. William Boyd has written to puppy-killer Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, saying the center would replace “an industrial asset” with “an incompatible use that generates minimal economic returns or community benefits,” raises “significant feasibility and infrastructure challenges,” and disregards “community input.”
Not exactly Making Merrimack Great Again.
Unsurprisingly, Gov. Maura Healey, the New Hampshire native who’s been a favorite pin cushion of Ayotte’s, is relishing her tormentor’s agony: “Gov. Ayotte needs to stand up and oppose this,” she says of the DHS folly. Ayotte’s pathetic, juvenile reply, as reported by the New Hampshire Journal: “Get your own house in order, Maura.”
Nah-nah-na-boo-boo!
Looks like that perfect wave has developed an ugly chop. Look out, Kelly. Rocks ahead.