Bill Straub: Bevin’s actions, while reprehensible, were not surprising and his ‘apology’ didn’t help

But I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

— Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin
(No, check that. Try Nina Simone)

A rather famous Kentuckian, a fellow named Lincoln, is credited with saying, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.’’ It is a precept that apparently escaped the attention of St. Matt the Divine, governor of the blessed commonwealth.

Gov. Bevin

The whole world now seems to grasp what many Bluegrass residents have come to realize over the past many months – the governor is a boob who all too often fails to display the sense God gave to geese. If, as former Texas Gov. Ann Richards once said, President George W. Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth,’’ Mad Matt arrived on this earth with both dogs firmly planted in his gaping yap.

To recap: Last week the gov was coming off what can only be described as an unsuccessful legislative session, with lawmakers reconfiguring the godawful budget he proposed and adopting revenue enhancements – weasel words for tax hikes – to stop the state’s education system from slipping back into the abyss from which it only recently emerged.

Both legislative measures, truth be known, are pretty terrible in their own right but not near as bad as the dregs that St. Matt offered, or didn’t offer since he failed to produce any semblance of a tax reform plan he’s been mouthing about ad infinitum. So he vetoed both the budget and the tax bill, only to be told in both instances to get lost by a House and Senate controlled by members of his own Republican Party.

It’s fair to say all of this put our boy in a puny mood, a condition further complicated by the commonwealth’s teachers who descended upon Frankfort on a number of occasions to protest – unsuccessfully as it turned out – mindless changes in their pension system. School districts across the state were forced to close while those charged with educating Kentucky’s future leaders on a pittance of what is required to perform the job properly, entered their objections.

So St. Matt lashed out, as is his want, vilifying the state’s teachers for practicing their right to redress, leading to the temporary closure of schools from Pikeville to Paducah so they could practice same.

“I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them,” Mad Matt said in an interview first aired by WDRB-TV in Louisville, tying such tragedy to the teacher walkout. “I guarantee you somewhere today, a child was physically harmed or ingested poison because they were home alone because a single parent didn’t have any money to take care of them.”

Our boy further noted, for good measure, “some were introduced to drugs for the first time because they were vulnerable and left alone.”

In other words, in addition to teaching readin’, rightin’ and ‘rithmatic, the state’s teachers, in the governor’s view, were responsible for child sexual and physical abuse, poisoning and drug pushing. Nothing short of infanticide, which seems, on the surface, at least, to defeat the purpose of this whole education thing.

Well, believe it or not, some folks took umbrage over this turn of events and voiced the opinion that Mad Matt was, well kind of a jerk, which comes as a surprise to no one who has followed his career. Even Republicans in the state legislature, ostensibly on St. Matt’s side, rushed to separate themselves from his remarks, realizing, obviously, that teachers are fully capable of exhibiting political clout in all 120 counties.

Disparaged from stem to stern over his spiteful remarks, St. Matt uncharacteristically waited two whole days before responding through a favorite medium, YouTube, where he doesn’t have to meet with anyone face-to-to-face and answer any of those doggone questions people are always raising. He offered what he characterized as an apology, although, with a nod to Twain, his word salad came as close to an apology as the lightning bug comes to the lightning.

St. Matt offered that the whole silly thing was just, heh-heh, “a misunderstanding’’ and that he needed to “clarify’’ his remarks. He expressed gratitude toward those who understood his message and conveyed his apologies to anyone who might have been hurt by his words. He thereafter went on blathering for a couple more minutes expressing nothing coherent.

In this YouTube statement, St. Matt failed to cite what everyone in the free world apparently misunderstood about his remarks, nor did he offer anything that can be described as approaching a clarification. That may be because his original message seemed pretty darn clear from the get-go – teachers are the bunk.

Frankly, the apologia didn’t go very far. In fact, many people interpreted it as him saying, “You people are rubes. Now leave me alone.’’ So he took another whack at it on Monday, finally coming up with a flimsy rationale that he was simply endeavoring to point out that “when children are left home alone, that’s not healthy.”

Now a lot of folks agree with that sentiment but that doesn’t explain why he bothered, for no reason, to link it to the commonwealth’s teachers taking their own version of Ferris Bueller’s day off if he didn’t intend to denigrate them. It matters little since on Tuesday, according to Mandy McLaren of The Courier-Journal of Louisville, St. Matt went on a conservative talk radio show and explained that his comments spoke to “an uncomfortable truth’’ – that the teachers’ job action carried “unintended consequences’’ and that thousands of children were left alone to their own devices.

Pruitt

All of which sounds like his original remarks with the nastiness swept under the rug.

But the subject was quickly changed Tuesday afternoon when the gov dumped the state Board of Education in favor of a right-wing cabal that immediately set about ridding the state of Dr. Stephen L. Pruitt, the highly-regarded education commissioner, without any real rationale other than the board intends to go in a different direction. That direction is likely expressing a ton of official support for charter schools at the expense, no doubt, of the standard public school system.

Regardless, the move gives people plenty to talk about other than St. Matt’s comments about teachers. It’s his minor league way of replicating President Trump’s tendency to flood the zone whenever bad news crops up, which is frequently.

In the end, the week’s doings once again show Mad Matt’s tendency to cast anyone or group who fails to respect his ‘authoritah’, as Eric Cartman of South Park might put it, as evil, trying to do great harm to that which he is sworn to protect.

All in all, it seems that St. Matt the Divine, whose idea of ending violence in Louisville’s West End is roving prayer groups, is displaying a bit of a Messiah complex, a condition that will likely fuel his often rumored intent to run for president of these United States. Then we’ll all have to ask the Lord for something.

The NKyTribune’s Washington columnist Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.