"13 Ways of Looking at a Blackguard"

or

The "Rich Girard is an Asshole" Poem

(with apologies to Wallace Stevens)

I
Among the static of 20 radio stations,
The only raving thing
Was the mouth of the blackguard Rich Girard.

II
The blackguard was of two minds,
Like a lunatic in an asylum
In which there are sociopaths.

III
The blackguard Girard laughed after his “act of contrition”.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A woman victimized by blackguard Girard
Is treated like a zero.

V
I do not know which most to abhor,
The rank hypocrisy
Or the sin of simony,
Blackguard Girard’s phony act of contrition
Or his “back to normal” shtick thereafter.

VI
Icicles filled his listeners’ souls
From news of his barbarity.
The shadow of the blackguard Girard’s evil
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the his evil
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O fat cats of the Queen City,
Why do you tolerate this moral pimp?
Do you not see how the blackguard Girard
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know of foul deeds
That would curl my hair (If I had any);
But I know, too,
That the blackguard Girard is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackguard Girard flew into yet another rage,
It marked the edge
Of one of his many delusions.

X
At the sight of blackguard Girard
Doing his show on Manchester Public TV,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
The blackguard drove around Manchester
In a car financed with a “kickback”.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The face glimpsed through the window
For one of his victims.

XII
The river of bulls— flowing from the radio stinks.
The blackguard Girard must be on air again.

XIII
It was a Friday afternoon.
The revelations were coming
And the s— was hitting the fan.
The blackguard Girard sat before his computer screen
Reading posts not yet revealed
With only one hand on the keyboard.

What Makes Richard H. Girard Stink? 

Is Stinky's rudeness rooted in a sense of personal inadequacy?

Manchester, N.H. – The most surprising development at the recent meeting of the Administration Committee of the Board of Mayor and Aldermen that was tackling the “Spice” overdose epidemic was the appearance of reactionary radio talk show host Rich Girard in the aldermanic chambers. It was the first public appearance by the man known as “Stinky” since the news of his sexting of a fan broke in the press.

The question on the minds of many people I have encountered since breaking the Girard sexting scandal is simple: What makes Rich stink? What makes him such a loathsome lout, so willing to attack others in the most vicious manner possible, not only engaging in petty personal attacks but reveling in the pain he causes? What makes this poisonous toad then croak “Victim!” as soon as his stunning hypocrisy is revealed? What makes this man such a shameless bully? What spun his soul into that of a world class phony who cried crocodile tears during the first half hour of his show after he was caught with his pants down, who then merrily went back to business in the second half hour after delivering his transparently false mea culpa?

The answer provided by people who have known Rich Girard since he was a child is this: A sense of personal inadequacy.

Didn’t Measure Up

The diminutive, balding reactionary gadfly apparently always was a pain the backside, even as a kid attending Parkside Junior High.

“He was a needler, even then,” one man who knew him when he was an adolescent told me recently. “Always needling, trying to push someone’s buttons.”

Another woman who had known Girard at this same time told me some months ago that Rich the kid had been a quarrelsome, obnoxious child, a true brat who always complained about everything. She found his behavior stunning in light of the fact that his parents were such dear, sweet people. She also told me she had recently encountered him after many years and was appalled by the fact that he hadn’t changed at all. He was a 40-something adolescent.

When I asked the man I was interviewing about this, he agreed that Girard was obnoxious.

“He’s mean,” the man said. “It comes from a sense of inadequacy. He was never good at sports. He never measured up.”

For an adolescent with the normal desire to fit in, his failure to excel at sports, in which he evaluated himself against other boys his age, apparently was devastating. An obstreperous child to begin with, his humiliation in junior high, as he was making the transition to young manhood, turned him bitter.

“A needler,” the man repeated. “A bully.”

Not a physical bully, but one deft in psychological warfare.

“He was known as ‘Stinky’ even then,” I was told, which startled me.

Jealousy

It is not much of a secret that Rich Girard is obsessed with Joe Kelly Levassseur, in a most unhealthy way.

“Simple jealousy,” one Queen City politico told me. “He would like to be Joe.”

How so? I asked this man who was a player behind the scenes. I told him I knew Girard was a failure as a politician, having been humiliated when he gave up his alderman-at-large seat to run for mayor a baker’s dozen years ago. He had failed as a politician, while Joe was still going strong. I pointed out that Girard’s still burning hope to be mayor had been dashed by the sex scandal.

“Oh, don’t count on that,” the politico said. “Stinky will always want to be mayor. Joe Kelly wants to be mayor. Everybody wants to be mayor.

I didn’t tell him I had no desire to be mayor. What I did was ask him what was the real germ of the animus Stinky has for Levasseur. Ideology? The fact that he was a factotum and water carrier for The Wiz and now plays lickspittle to Uncle Teddy Gatsas while Joe remains his own man?

The politico sighed.

“Simple jealousy,” he repeated. “Look, Joe is tall and good looking,” the latter of which was a revelation to me, “and is popular among regular people, not your typical insider [expletive deleted].”

I admitted that I was surprised by how many Democrats, even liberals, liked Joe personally, respecting his “testicular fortitude”, to use a Tammy Simmonsism.

“Joe is our Manny Ramirez,” the politico said. “Just like Manny being Manny was ‘Manny being Manny’….”

“Joe being Joe is ‘Joe being Joe’.”

“Bingo,” he politico said. “He’s also changing, maturing, probably since he became a father. Having children, having children you care for, and being with a good woman will do that to a man who was as reckless as Joe has been.”

The Future

“Look,” the politico said, “Joe has a future. Stinky has what? He’s totally dependent on the good graces of Will Infantine, and don’t believe any of that [expletive deleted] about Infantine wanting to fire Stinky. Infantine would be lost without Stinky. He does all the work at the station.”

“The same station that Infantine told me he didn’t own?”

“Bingo.”

It was time for the politico to make his exit.

“Listen, and I will say it slowly that so even a concrete-headed half-Irishman like you can understand: Stinky… is … jealous … of … Joe.

“He’d like to be six feet tall instead of four feet ten. He’d like to be the ‘Hail fellow well met’ type of regular guy that people enjoy being with. He’d like to own a popular spot that people like coming to. He’d like to be in a healthy relationship rather than being the bullying paterfamilias chez Girard and hiding in the rumpus room, making like some horny old fart on the sly, begging for nookie from some poor kid handed around like a joint by the libertarians.”

He then hit me with a bombshell. “You do know that Stinky introduced the girl to Phil Greazzo, and Greazzo took her to a Republican bash, don’t you, or are your sources drying up?”

While I was digesting that bit of information, the politico gave me his parting remarks: “Would you rather be Joe Levasseur, who some day just might be mayor, or a bitter little handyman, a messenger taking orders from Infantine and delivering messages for him and Mayor Fatass?

“You know the answer,” he said. “When Stinky dies and by some miracle gets to heaven, he’s going to yell at god for letting him lose to Bob Baines.”

Personal Inadequacy

Is it a sense of personal inadequacy that is the root cause of Rich “Stinky” Girard’s bullying behavior and habitual nastiness? Is it a sense of personal inadequacy that fuels the jealousy that has made Stinky the self-appointed nemesis of Alderman Joe Kelly Levasseur?

Is Rich Girard’s failure to measure up to his male peers the root cause of his appalling treatment of women? Not only did he try to sexually exploit a vulnerable young woman fan who looked up at him as a hero, but sources tell me that he sexually harassed a woman employee at his Primerica financial services office. The woman reportedly quit when Primerica did not take her charges seriously.

Apparently, she was not the only woman Girard had harassed, but the first one that complained to his bosses. Girard reportedly was given a pass by Primerica as he was a top producer for the high-pressure financial services company many in the industry consider little better than a pyramid scheme. It’s little wonder that Girard, always ready to exploit the vulnerable, remains firmly ensconced at Primerica.

Rumors about Girard the sex harasser have circulated among the Queen City cognoscenti long before I began writing about local Manchester politics. The rumor of Girard the sex harasser is a near universal “tip” I receive from people whom I interview about Girard.

If the sources are right and Girard did indeed sexually harass his former Primerica employee, this completes a portrait of a profoundly troubled man working out his inadequacies not just on his perceived (and mostly imaginary) enemies, but more troublingly, on vulnerable women. Girard, a “Professional Christian” in his public life, likes to pose as the savior and defender of women and families. He is nothing of the sort; rather, he is the most monumental hypocrite in Queen City history since the passing of William Loeb.

Weeks before the sexting scandal broke, I appeared on television and predicted that I would not be surprised if Rich Girard was caught in a sexually compromising situation. That came to pass. Do not be surprised if, in the near future, other rumors about Girard turn out to be true.

Rich Girard is Full of Horseshit!

Rich Girard & The Rusty Spoon: Radio Talk Show Host is Full of Horseshit

Bullshit artiste Richard H. Girard is a legend in his own mind & those of his acolytes

“Rich Girard’s intelligence and talent has taken him far. All the way from West High School, across the Biron bridge, to a flower shop in Pinardville.”  — Anonymous Ward 10 Resident

My late father was a “Tin Man”, a “Sider”, a purveyor and peddler of aluminum & vinyl siding and various other “home improvements” for any price he could get from the local gentry of various states with weak consumer protection laws. He built up a formidable reputation in the Wall Business, known coast-to-coast as a top-notch closer who could “handle a hot stove”.

The Old Man would probably have been on the road into his eighties if the Democrats and Republicans, in the spirit of bipartisanship, hadn’t looted the savings and loan industry in the 1980s. With the collapse of the S&Ls, his financing dried up and he spent the last 15 years of his life gardening and nursing the hemorrhoids that were the honneurs de combat of his many years and millions of miles odysseying ‘cross the continental United States. At both speedometer-obliterating velocities on the Interstates and “mooch speed” while trawling through neighborhoods, the leather seats of innumerable yet memorable Caddies and Lincoln Continentals did a number on his own seat!

When I was a boy, he passed on to me two bits of wisdom worth considerably more than two bits that, in my many decades as a denizen of this planet, have never been disproven. “Jon,” the man I called Dad told me, “the essence of life is somebody’s always trying to sell you a horse made out of horse manure.”

There was a corollary to that observation: “People will eat manure off of a rusty spoon.”

I thought of both of Dad’s maxims back in March when I attempted to listen to Rich Girard’s smear of New Hampshire Executive Councillor Chris Pappas on his radio show, Girard at Large, and then thought of it again this week when listening to his phony “act of contrition” when his sexting scandal was revealed. Not does Girard maked a horse out of horse manure, but the reactionary audience for his brazen brand of bull would eat manure off of a rusty spoon.

(By the way, Dad used an earthy anglo-saxonism in place of “manure”.)

Minister of Propaganda

Back in March, when the weather was still horrendous, the reactionary radio personality Rich Girard made a pathetic attempt to link New Hampshire Executive Councillor Chris Pappas to an allegedly Planned Parenthood-affiliated site supposedly promoting BDSM (bondage & discipline/sado-mascochism). Since Pappas has favored funding for Planned Parenthood, in Girard’s ken, he was actively promoting BDSM!

Planned Parenthood’s ties to the site “promoting” BDSM are so tenuous, one can only think of the word Manchester CIty Solicitor Thomas Clark used when describing Girard’s take on the Queen City’s proposed right to know law: “Absurd”.

Needless to say, the politician in question was a Democrat. His prestigious office, that of Executive Councillor, seemingly is coveted by Girard’s bosom buddy Phil Greazzo, who most recently lost election to the State Senate a year before Manchester voters bounced him from his position as alderman in November 2013.

(On Phil’s behalf, it can be said that since he’s won three of the nine elections he’s contested since 2002, if he were a baseball player, his .333 average might put him in the Hall of Fame. Alas, in reality, his won-loss ratio consigns him to the politician’s Hall of Shame.)

Rich Girard himself is a Republican, yet another former aldermen of the city of Manchester. His failed mayoral candidacy, when former mayor Robert Baines ate him up and excreted him as easily as a dog devours and passes a rawhide bone, distinguishes him somewhat from Greazzo. Since being drubbed in the 2001 mayor’s race, Girard’s main occupation is broadcasting right-wing rhetoric from atop a flower shop in Pinardville, the gateway to Goffstown, a suburb of the Queen City.

The more one listens to Girard’s gibberish on a non-profit “Christian” radio station seemingly powered by a 25-watt light bulb whose airwaves can’t even reach all of Manchester, the more one experiences a self-styled Minister of Propaganda for the reactionary, anarcho-libertarian faction that has taken over the Manchester City Republican Party and which runs amok in New Hampshire at large. Though occasionally capable of lucidity and sometimes a simulacrum of reason, when Rich Girard lets it rip, which is often, he comes off a kind of Josef Goebbels-Lite for the Granite State neo-fascist set.

Equating Rich Girard to Dr. Goebbels may be too harsh — after all, Girard is no anti-Semite and has had no hand in genocide, except perhaps the near total wipeout of the New Hampshire Democrats in the 2010 elections — but yet, Girard himself seems to be driven by demons and is no stranger to trucking in hate. I, myself, saw the dark side of the radio host when he tried to pick a fight with me in a City Hall men’s room.

He has called for one school committee member in neighboring Hooksett who attracted his ire to have “his face pushed in” and during one of his frequent rants against Manchester Alderman Joseph Kelly Levasseur, he actually said that a certain alderman should be “hanged” in the aldermanic chambers.

Listening to Girard in full screech mode, when he starts to bray like a flea-bitten jackass being tormented by a sadistic child possessing a stout stick, one is reminded of Professor Henry Higgins remonstration over Eliza Doolittle’s unreconstructed English at the beginning of My Fair Lady: “Heavens, what a sound!”

Compost Heap

Perhaps it is fitting that Rich Girard toils over a flower shop, as compost if not manure itself is always readily at hand. He excelled himself in fabricating a horse made of horse manure when he attempted to link Chris Pappas to BDSM on his March broadcast.

Pappas is openly gay, and it did not surprise me for a man of Girard’s ilk to try to smear a gay candidate by linking him to a sexual practice that many of Girard’s conservative audience would consider deviant. His actual fabrication of the horse-from-horse-manure is not pertinent; what is important is that it illustrates the McCarthyite tactics that reactionary populists like Girard truck in.

Around the time of this broadcast, Girard actually “caught” me in the very wee small hours of the morning trying to take a picture of the flower shop that rents him an office to illustrate this article, which I planned for a relaunch of my Yahoo! column. For a hoot, I had placed an old campaign lawn sign of the man he currently hates most, Joe Kelly Levasseur (who unlike Girard, has managed to be reelected), in a snow bank to get a picture of both signs. Alas, Girard arrived unexpectedly early at the flower shop and me and my mother’s old dog, who is diabetic and has a penchant for waking me up at 4AM to be taken out to relieve her bladder, vamoosed from his place in Pinardville.

Later that night, at City Hall, Girard tried to pick a fight with me in the men’s room. I decided to put off the launch of my column as I was not expecting such a reaction from someone whom I believe is emotionally unstable and capable of violence.

The Cankered Soul of Richard H. Girard

Why I wanted a picture of the flower ship sign was because it was ballyhooing Women’s Day, a holiday on March 8th that is little known in this country. Women’s Day, the sign said, was a good reason to get the woman in your life some flowers.

Woman’s Day is actually known as International Women’s Day, and the first time I had ever heard of it was from a woman who had been born in the Soviet Union. Also known as International Working Women’s Day, it was created in Europe in 1910 by European socialists and was a holiday in the U.S.S.R. and remains so in post-Soviet Russia.

If I were to engage in the kind of McCarthyite smear that Rich Girard engaged in to try to hurt Christ Pappas, I would, say, link Girard via the flower shop (specifically, the flower shop sign) to socialism (which is implicit in International Woman’s Day), and might even go further and link him to the bullying of Putin’s Russia, where Women’s Day is a recognized holiday. After all, the Free State movement that Girard is so passionate about did invite Edward Snowden’s lawyer to their “Liberty Forum” in Manchester just before Putin snatched the Crimea from Ukraine.

Such a smear would have as much substance as Girard’s linking of Chris Pappas to BDSM. However, it would perfectly illustrate Girard’s mastery of the horse-out-of-horse manure paradigm. From his perch in Pinardville, Rich Girard wields la cuillère rouillée to spoonfeed his listeners manure.

It is most upsetting, if not unappetizing, to witness the half-wits zealously supping on Girard’s rhetorical diet of horse manure. My father is proven right once again, but I take no comfort in that.

We citizens of New Hampshire are the poorer for the likes of Richard H. Girard, who uses the First Amendment as a shield to hide behind while he vociferously vents his spleen against people who are far better than he can ever hope to be. Yet, I can take some consolation in the fact that there probably aren’t 100 people in the million plus souls who call the Granite State home who take seriously this amateurish demagogue who sits festering in a flower shop attic, afflicted with moral and intellectual rot.

It is too bad the flower shop over which Girard perches, a fine establishment that I have patronized many times, doesn’t have a spray that can remove the cankers that festoon Rich Girard’s corrupted soul.

VIDEO EXTRA - LINK 2 SEX TEXTS

Gatsasland Family Radio Presents: Rich Girard Likes it Sleazy!

Ted Gatas Hearts Rich Girard Despite Sexting Scandal

Ted Gatas Continues to Appear onRich Girard Talk Show Despite Sexting Scandal

Pinardville, N.H. – Queen City Mayor Ted Gatas is still appearing on Rich Girard’s show, despite the sexting scandal that revealed the conservative radio talk host to be a hideous hypocrite and two-faced simoniac. Girard’s constantly self-professed religious piety, which he used as a bullwhip to flail others failing to meet his high moral standards, and his position as a defender of “Christian Family Values” were revealed to be both a front and a fraud.

No one over the age of ten in my knowledge is shocked upon hearing of behavior by a professional politician like Uncle Teddy that could be characterized as “shameless”. However, there are bounds of both propriety and good taste.

Sources tell me that at an event at which several aldermen had gathered just after the scandal had broken, on the very day Hizzoner has made his first appearance on Girard at Large, a text arrived on one alderman’s smart phone from a highly respected colleague some believe may one day be Ted Gatsas’s sucessor. That member of the Board of Mayor and Aldermen expressed disgust that the Great Gasbag would stoop so low as to bolster Girard’s cratering credibility by showing up in Pinardville, the Goffstown suburb from where Girard at Large is broadcast from atop a flower shop, to appear on the show.

Comeuppance for a Queen City Conservative Icon

Last week, the ex-mayoral candidate who fancies himself as Gatsas’s successor at City Hall, became embroiled in a sexting scandal that many thought might terminate his career on the Christian network that broadcasts his Girard at Large program. Yet, Rich Girard is still broadcasting two weeks after the scandal roiled the Queen City, and Gatsas is still appearing on his show.

The scorn arising from the sexting scandal was seen by many as a fitting comeuppance for Girard, who has always played the role of “Professional Christian”, more devout and moral than his enemies (who are legion by many of whom exist mainly in Girard’s mind). When it was found out that this allegedly devout Catholic went from defending the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision that enabled the family owned business to ban coverage for birth control devices it considered abortifacients like the intrauterine device (IUD), to almost simultaneously trying to seduce a fan and asking her if she was outfitted with an IUD, most people who read about it were appalled.

The Union Leader newspaper, which had sat on the sexting scandal story for over a week, did not mention Girard’s real position concerning the use of an IUD in its coverage. Indeed, the Union Leader ran two “Letters to the Editor” praising the Hobby Lobby decision on Thursday, July 24th, highly ironic in its own cover-up of the hypocrisy of the main Hobby Lobby supporter in New Hampshire.

Many conservatives were afraid that the sex scandal would, in a political and moral sense, “debag” Girard (an operation some women taking to the social media comment boards counseled Girard’s wife, the mother of his five children, to consider). They feared he would become an albatross in the political arena, and hurt such issues as opposition to the Common Core teaching scandals that Girard has been out front on.

They needn’t have worried. Not only did the Union Leader whitewash the story, television station WMUR and its political correspondent James Pindell, who apparently had interviewed the young woman that was the object of Girard’s affection, ignored the story completely.

And Gatsas and others feel free to go back on Girard at Large, without acquiring any of the stink from association with the Queen City’s #1 skunk.

Why?

A sweet young thing contemplates surrendering to the Ayotollah's dream of love.

A Man Called “Stinky”

I asked Alderman-at-Large Joseph Kelly Levasseur about this development. Not only is he “Girard’s nemesis”, according to the Union Leader, he helped break the story via his Facebook page.

“Gatsas is a bully, but he doesn’t have a three hour per day, five day per week radio show like Rich Girard does,” Levasseur told me in an email. “He needs Girard to pound on his enemies, real or perceived, so he has made the calculation that keeping Stinky on his side is worth being seen as a stooge by going on Girard’s show.”

“Stinky” is the nickname that Rich Girard earned while he served as the aide-de-camp of Mayor Ray Wieczorek in the 1990s. He was so hated, the Board of Mayor and Alderman voted to eliminate that position.

However, when one reads the unexpurgated sexts between Girard and the young woman and discovers his unbridled lust for the scent of a woman’s genitals, one wonders if Girard’s sexually predatory behavior was known then, and the nickname “Stinky” came from that.

An alderman and state senator before winning the mayor’s chair, Ted Gatsas was not elected alderman until the year 2000, his arrival coming after the departure of Rich Girard, who had been elected alderman-at-large in the previous election and served but one term. Maybe he knows the secret of Stinky’s nickname.

No matter which way you look at it, the relationship between Gatsas and Girard stinks!

VIDEO EXTRA - LINK 2 SEX TEXTS

Gatsasland Family Radio Presents: Rich Girard Likes it Sleazy!