What to do with Jeff Sessions? Caught, again, with his hand in disparagement’s cookie jar. According to former FBI official Andrew McCabe in the book “The Threat,” the former attorney general observed that the FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen. They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like … people with nose rings and tattoos …”
In the era of “Me Too,” and rooting out decades-old high jinks of those rascally Virginia politicians, we can’t just let this one slide. Tracing an ancestor all the way back to 1700 Ireland’s County Donegal, I’ll claim a toe-hold among the aggrieved and send the paddy wagon to haul Jeff in for some sensitivity re-education.
Oops … there I go. Describing an Irishman, “paddy” can be offensive or not, depending upon its intent. During Civil War-era draft riots, New York police vans rounded up so many Irish immigrants, the vehicles were dubbed “paddy wagons.” The moniker stuck for decades.
Dissing the Irish has a long history. Pope Adrian IV described Ireland in 1155 as “a rude and barbarous nation.” Thirty years later, Gerald of Wales, writer and chaplain to England’s King Henry II, observed that the Irish are “dedicated only to leisure and laziness … they live like animals.” That from a chaplain? Ouch.
Even the renowned French philosopher Voltaire weighed in about the Irish as “savage and backward.” Cartoonist Thomas Nast penned an 1871 cartoon illustrating a drunken Irishman swinging a bottle and lighting a powder keg upon which he was seated.
An 1881 cartoon revealed a gorilla-featured Irishman caged and depicted as a “recently discovered wild beast.” And 20th century readers thought the Washington Post’s Herbert Block could be tough!
Passing years brought little enlightenment. In 1999, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher observed to Peter Mandelson, the UK’s secretary for Northern Ireland: “You can’t trust the Irish; they are all liars.” Oh, Lady Maggie!
Comparing Jeff’s intellectual wattage to that of past popes, philosophers, and prime ministers would be unfair, so we shouldn’t have expected more. Assuming we unearth no photos of him dressed as that Lucky Charms leprechaun, nor in possession of any unauthorized shamrocks, perhaps we’ll let him off on March 17 with an extra pinch and no green beer.
Sorry, as I have no body ink or piercings, someone else will have to “tattoo” Jeff about the rest of it.
Douglas Smith
Rockingham