Joyce Craig’s Reelection Show Queen City Rejecting the Politics of Doom and Destruction
Victoria Sullivan & Joe Kelly Levasseur Violated Norms of Simple Common Decency — OPINION
Victoria Sullivan and Alderman Joe Kelly Levasseur showed a profound and troubling disrespect for Manchester during the recent municipal election.
The Queen City is my hometown. I grew up here (born in Goffstown as my mother’s Elliot Hospital doctor was on call the at Moore General the day I decided to come into the world). I went to school here and joined the United States Army at the Manchester Military Entrance Processing Station.
I came back to Manchester after 30 years because my mother had Alzheimer’s and my family needed help.
I buried my mother here, next to my grandparents, in the same Pine Grove Cemetery where slumber eternally my great-grandfather (who came from Edinburgh, Scotland), great-grandmother, my great-Aunt Agnes (Jeff Kassell, the father of the Tax Cap, lives in her old house in the North End) and my oldest brother.
As a political journalist, I have criticized Manchester and Mayor Joyce Craig, as that is the role of played by writers in the ongoing experiment that is the American democracy. Writers and political gadflies were once called “critical spirits” in political science, and critical spirits are necessary to provide the feedback to a society so that it can remain in balance.
There are critical spirits, and then there are demagogues.
Never have I seen such corrosive language and behavior as I have seen from Victoria Sullivan and Joe Kelly Levasseur.
I was a severe critic of Ted Gatsas and even wound up sued by him, in court, for authoring a petition asking that the Board of Mayor and Aldermen investigate his cover up of the West High rape. Yet, never did I doubt that Ted Gatsas loved Manchester.
Never would Ted Gatsas have said what Sullivan and Levasseur have said about Manchester during this campaign.
I am a harsh critic of Rich Girard. Yet, I have never doubted that RIch Girard loves Manchester…. Rich goes beyond the pale, in my opinion, in his treatment of people as a “critical spirit”…but the behavior of Victoria Sullivan during this election brought me new respect for Girard.
Rich Girard is BRUTAL in his criticism of municipal institutions and public officials when he believes they are wrong or in the wrong. Even as bad as he is, he never stepped across the line that Victoria Sullivan did in this campaign.
I am not the only pundit and political observer who believe this was the dirtiest, most vicious campaign in Manchester political history, and politics is a form of street fighting often characterized as NO HOLDS BARRED.
But Victoria Sullivan violated even that low standard. In the limbo dance that is Manchester politics, she not only cleared the lowest rung hovering just above the floor as she shimmied underneath the bar, if the damn thing had been dropped onto the floor, she could have flattened herself out by expelling the last breath of simple common decency in her body and slithered under it.
Joe Kelly Levasseur’s political lifetime of transgression is an atrocity exhibition. The single most unethical human being I have ever known, Levasseur should have been Conduct Boarded by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen and, based on his 2014 censure for attacking the Manchester Police Department with unfounded charges, been removed from the Board of Mayor and Aldermen.
Former Ward 10 Alderman Phil Greazzo — who called Levasseur a “pathological liar” —was right when he said that the Board does does have the power to kick Joe Kelly Levasseur’s sorry ass off the BMA.
Simple Human Decency
In my opinion, Victoria Sullivan and Joe Kelly Levasseur violated every standard of SIMPLE HUMAN DECENCY.
The damage they inflicted on this city is terrible, but this is a dynamic city once again under the sane, rational and very HUMAN and HUMANE leadership of Mayor Joyce Craig.
When the Wall Street Journal and US News Report rank Joyce Craig’s Manchester — OUR MANCHESTER — among the elite in their rankings of best cities to live in (and retire in), it gives lie to the vicious and erroneous propaganda that spewed from the mouth and fetid soul of Joe Kelly Levasseur, and from Victoria Sullivan and her stable of professional political advisers. (There are several words beginning with the word “a” that come to mind when considering Tricky Vicky’s advisers: One of them is “assassins.”)
That is my opinion.
I missed the glory years of Manchester (I didn’t get back to the Queen City until 2010), but Mayor Joyce Craig is calming the chaos of the Ted Gatsas years. Under her leadership, the City of Manchester is on track to be greater than it ever was.
