Tweedledee

The next time I hear about Halliburton charging $40,000 for a roll of toilet paper I’ll know where they got the idea. Boss Tweed and his Tammany Ring were quite the creative book cookers back in the 1860s and 1870s. And Ken Ackerman’s book “Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York” is actually quite entertaining. If politics or history aren’t your bag, the book is still good for more than a few laughs. I mean the Tammany boys just had such balls! They were like, “Yeah, we’re taking the money…watcha gonna do about it?” (A quote often attributed to Tweed but actually coined by his arch nemesis Thomas Nast.) So yeah, it only cost $250,000 to build the new city courthouse, but we’re gonna write it up as $13 million. And when the New York Times starts saying, “Hey you crooks, show us your books” Tweed invites John Jacob Astor and other scions of Victorian society to tea and lets them look around for a few hours. The bluebloods don’t dig too deep so find nothing wrong. Tweed flaunts it all over New York. The Time and Nast eventually bought the Ring down but at least the man has a few bars named after him. Nast was an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration racist who regularly drew Irishmen as simian-faced goons with gin bottles protruding from ragged clothing. Nice guy. So what if he did draw Santa Claus—I’ve yet to see a bar named after him.