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Democrats aim their guns at turncoat Tim Cahill
By Howie Carr | Wednesday, September 21, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists

Hey, Tim Cahill, did you forget the old saying, “No good deed goes unpunished?”

The guy goes out there last year and takes a bullet for the team — the Democrat team. He mounts a kamikaze run for governor that allows Deval Patrick to be re-elected with a landslide 49 percent of the vote, and this is the reward he gets?

He’s in a photo finish with a grand jury. His fellow Democrats on Beacon Hill want to indict him.

Where’s the gratitude here? Cahill was the best kind of straw candidate there is — he didn’t even know he was a straw. In late 2008, a couple of unemployed grifters from the McCain campaign blew into town looking for their next mark. They sold him on the preposterous idea he could be elected governor as an independent. Cahill thought he was taking down his enemy Deval, but in reality he was wrecking the Republican’s campaign.

And now Marsha Coakley has indicted his ex-chief of staff and the ex-Probation commissioner John O’Brien, whose wife and daughter both got jobs from Cahill (a fact you read first in this newspaper, by the way, two months before it appeared in the Globe).

So now Marsha’s minions are trying to put the squeeze on Timmy’s lackey, a guy named Scott Campbell. He’s 40. That tells you all you need to know about whether he’ll stand up under pressure. What was it the Mafia guy in New Jersey said about the current state of omerta, the code of silence?

“This ‘men of honor’ thing is all (expletive),” he told a younger protege. “It’s like a bakery with these guys. They take a number and wait in line to rat you out.”

It’s even worse in politics. But what’s more perplexing is that Campbell is charged with hiring O’Brien’s hack wife after O’Brien threw an $11,000 time for Cahill. Since when is this against the law?

Tim Cahill, last seen raking leaves outside his Quincy home, has got to be thinking, haven’t I been punished enough? He threw away the second-best job in state government, and where does he go from here? He used to own a coffee shop in Quincy – Handcuffs, I mean, Handshakes. His $107,000-a-year chief of staff at the Lottery was another Quincy deli owner named Al Grazioso.

What is it with all these treasurers since Bob Crane? Joe Malone, Shannon O’Brien, Tim Cahill — all ran for governor and lost. Now Steve Grossman is doing the same thing. There must be something in the water up there in that office.

And now Marsha Coakley has gotten religion. She blows an easy race she should have won, and so she decides to whip Tim Cahill like a rented mule. First she indicts that pipsqueak from Southie, Brian Wallace, for campaign-finance violations, and now she’s got Cahill in the cross hairs. What do they have in common? They’re out of office and they can’t fight back.

Time for a little Shakespeare, Timmy: “When sorrows come, they come not (as) single spies, but in battalions.”

Battalions of hacks.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1367517