Of Few Things I Am Certain

One of them is that I intensely dislike Terry McAuliffe. Hate is a strong word, to be reserved for...well, no, fuck that. I hate Terry McAuliffe. Of course, most of you would not find this surprising.

McAuliffe is noteworthy not because I hate him, then, but because I'm confident that I would have hated him whenever I was exposed to him. For many contemptible people, it's not hard to imagine liking them, if certain circumstances were different. If I'd met him before that bitch of a girlfriend poisoned him, I might have liked him. I bet he was really chill until he got that job, or didn't get into that school, or became gay. Before he got old and became insane, he was probably a reasonable professor.

Not so McAuliffe. If, in some alternate universe, Terry McAuliffe the boy and I had lived next door to one another, I would have hated him. If we'd been in homeroom together, I'd have hated him. When he's 90 and some sort of éminence grise in the Democratic establishment, or wherever his political ambitions land him, I will hate him. If we volunteered at the same soup kitchen; if I were to marry his daughter; if he simply, for no reason, gave me $1,000,000, I would hate him.

Indeed the vitriol I feel for the man is probably irrational. I tried to make a list of his deplorable qualities, and it isn't that impressive:

• He's chirpy - ugh.
• He's a liar - fine/reasonable.
• He's totally unhinged from reality when it suits him to be - ugh (understandable).
• He's enthusiastic - ugh.
• He's unintelligent - ugh.
• He's utterly, totally, insanely shameless - ugh.
• He hunts - ugh.
  

There was a kid, MP, who played baseball with my brother for a number of years. MP was a hustler in the David Eckstein model: a mediocre-to-bad player who ALWAYS hustled, even when it made no sense to. He was the kind of catcher who would dive for foul balls that were clearly going over the backstop and out of play. The kind of kid who would score sliding when there wasn't even a throw to the plate - in warmups (gotta be the first to get the uniform dirty!). The kind of kid who was always "firing up" his teammates by screaming incoherently at them while they were trying to focus on hitting - with a metal stick - a small, white ball flying at them at the speed cars travel on the freeway. The kind of kid who was always yelling about how many outs there were, even if he was wrong. Terry McAuliffe is a grown-up version of MP. I hate Terry McAuliffe.

(Incidentally, this line from Eve Fairbanks' pre-Gubernatorial profile of McAuliffe is pretty funny: "The idea of Terry McAuliffe babysitting an autistic child seems a patently bad one.")