This is a special edition of the Weekly Joke Revue
Will this blow the doors off the Senate race? Probably not. But it’s funny. I don’t know if Brown was pretending to be something he’s not, or if he just made a mistake, or what. It’s funny anyway.
OK, so in 1982, as you may recall, Scottie the Hottie had just let it all hang out for Cosmo. A couple of months later, the New York Times did a story (login req’d – PDF here) called “Modeling: New Faces from Old Families.” The article was about young, beautiful people who came from old, beautiful families. Saith the NYT:
these models today include a grandson and granddaughter of Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. Also in the group is the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia as well as the great-granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, the British publisher. Another top New York model is descended from not one but two former United States Senators, her father (Joseph Tydings) and grandfather (Millard Tydings), both of Maryland.
And Scott Brown’s in that article too! Wait a sec, you say, I thought Brown was a regular guy who drives a pickup. He’s royalty??
No, not exactly royalty. But — at least the way he told it to the NY Times — about as close as you can get in Massachusetts legal circles. The story says:
Until a few weeks ago, Scott Brown was a 22-year-old first-year law student at Boston College Law School who frequently ran across opinions written by his great-grandfather, Arthur Prentice Rugg, former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.”I read many of his cases this year,” he said, ”which I found amusing.”
Wow! Scott Brown is Chief Justice Arthur Prentice Rugg’s great grandson? That’s amazing! Chief Justice Rugg was, indeed, a giant of Massachusetts law. (Irrelevant footnote: the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray, for which I used to work, was at one time called Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge & Rugg.)
Awkwardly, though, it’s not true. The Times later had to run a correction, which read:
An article on the Style page last Sunday incorrectly described the relationship of Scott Brown, a fashion model, to the late Arthur Prentice Rugg, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. They were distantly related.
Hilarious.
Also hilarious, though purely for entertainment value, is the entirety of Brown’s commentary to the Times in this article. It’s on the flip.
Until a few weeks ago, Scott Brown was a 22-year-old first-year law student at Boston College Law School who frequently ran across opinions written by his great-grandfather, Arthur Prentice Rugg, former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
”I read many of his cases this year,” he said, ”which I found amusing.” Then, in May, Mr. Brown was named the Sexiest Man in America by Cosmopolitan magazine, based on a photograph submitted by his 16-year-old sister, LeeAnn. He posed for the magazine’s centerfold, received nationwide publicity and now is a model with Sue Charney Models in New York.
A Law Student First
”One thing should be clarified,” Mr. Brown said in a recent interview. ”I’m a law student before I’m a model. One of the reasons I’m modeling is so I can make a lot of contacts that might one day lead to contracts when I become an entertainment lawyer.”
Mr. Brown, who graduated with a 3.5 grade-point average from Tufts University, where he was captain of the basketball team, recently invested $5,000 to print 10,000 colored posters of himself bare to the waist. He said if the posters sold well and he continued to get modeling jobs, he wouldn’t return to law school until next January. Otherwise, he said, he will return this fall.
”I’m not going to jeopardize a good legal career,” he said. ”I was doing some good cerebral work in law school. You don’t need a good mind in the modeling business.”
Discuss
15 Comments . Leave a comment below.He seems to have zero qualifications to hold national office, but our friends and neighbors are actually thinking about giving him a ticket to Washington. I was thinking that good old fashioned sexism was primarily respobsible for his surge in popularity in the past few weeks, but I met a lady today, a doctor, who said she is "very upset" with how things are going, is worried about "her compensation" in the wake of health care reform, opposes Cape Wind (which Brown, apparently pandering to the Alliance for Nantucket Sound and similar folk, also opposes), and is still upset at Coakley for "the nanny trial". I told her I hardly remembered that event, and didn't even associate Coakley with it, because at that time in my life I wasn't paying much attention to the news. It seems like ages ago- I remember merely thinking the girl was guilty of shaking the baby...I guess other people felt differently. A lot of people seem about to vote based on a personal dislike of Coakley herself. I think she did a very good job as attorney general- doing the best she could to pursue Big Dig contractors, getting reimbursement from Turner Entertainment for their marketing stunt that caused a panic, pursuing banks and credit card companies for unfair practices and so forth. She's much more likely to look out for average people, but people don't seem to relize that. A disaster in the making, this Brown character. Definite echoes of Romney- my guess is he'll me migrating to a more anti-gay, Pro-life stance immediately before running for president very soon.
He's already there. No pretense of support for gay rights. No pretense of concern over the direction of the war, no pretense of concern over health care. He is a dogmatic right winger and certainly unfit for MA. I'd happily vote for Charlie Baker or Tisei if either ran against Coakley, but thats not the Republican we are looking at.
So, Scott Brown posed as a close relative of a semi-famous lawyer to the New York Time for his modeling career. That's wonderful.
All I have to say is that if Martha Coackley had pretended to be F. Lee Bailey's niece or something in order to get a free super-sizing at McDonald's, it would be on the front page of the Herald and the tea baggers would never shut up about it.
That Brown, even at a young age when no one was looking, will say anything to to benefit himself and get his name in the news and camera. He loves himself too much.
she is from around here, right?
http://ow.ly/X2fr
Great that she's trying to make her push on a holiday weekend with the Suffolk poll showing 1% undecided (that leaves things wide open for sure). I'll give Hillary a pass in 2000 with the Cubs/Yankees stuff, but this is a little silly.
Seriously, we were looking at office space on Thursday and ended up at the building in Needham that Scott Brown's campaign is headquartered. You can throw all the "teabag" stuff out you want, but looking at the folks there I'd say you guys are in trouble, even if she squeaks out a win (which my gut feeling is telling me isn't going to happen).
Two things have conspired: 1) Flight 253, which brought the fact that despite the new administration still demonstrates that there are a few people out there who don't exactly like us and 2) the Health Care Bill. I know that this is a passionate issue, but come on. Even the Globe is starting to figure out that the crap in the bill is going to slam this state hard with this whole "Cadillac Tax" on health plans. Do we have a problem with health care? Sure, but let's all get together and fix it in a bipartisan manner similar to Reagan/O'Neill with the 1983 SS commission. What is in the House/Senate bill right now, once someone actually looks at the fine print, will probably lead to '94 times two when people add up the numbers. Sent the following e-mail this morning to Beth Healy in response to her article:
People aren't stupid; we are a target here in this state, and if the solution in both versions of the bill is to push high cost plans to lower cost/higher deductibles but also cutting FSA/HSA plans at the knees, eventually the math will kick in and folks will realize that they are going to spending thousands of dollars more over the status quo. Numbers don't lie (but politicians do).
and we had to say dickety cuz the kaiser stole our word for twenty! I chased him to get it back but lost him after dickety-six miles...
to a certain WWI era german general ;)
he certainly seems willing to just about say or do anything to propel himself to power, with very little to earn it. Coakley at least has some statewide experience and has done some good work. Brown will say anything to get the teabagger support, then lie about those very things he said back home, since they can't sell well here. He's faced almost no major scrutiny on these points, because he hasn't been the front runner (and because the GOP generally gets away with this BS all the time, because of the double standards given to the two parties that have existed as far back as my memory can serve).
It's not clear that Brown claimed he was the great, great grandson of the SJC Chief Justice. The mistake may have been his, or it may have been the paper's (the paper doesn't specify that the error was due to information supplied to it). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one who contacted the paper to make the correction. In any case, it's just not clear.
I'm no Brown fan, but this is a misfire!
Do you think the NYT called up Brown out of the blue because they thought, maybe, he was the great grandson of a Chief Justice? How else would Brown have ended up in a Times story about models from famous families? Sorry, but that doesn't make sense.
And by the way, if that were the case, you'd see EaBo or one his minions all over this thread explaining why Brown is innocent on this -- as they did on the Canada Free Press thread. Their absence on this one is telling.
Brown may have told people that he was related to this guy (perhaps he told people the Judge was the great-grandfather of so-and-so in his family), but the NYT misunderstood the relationship. Stuff like this happens all the time in the news business. There are many possible explanations but the point is we don't know how the error made it to print. As to the Brown cohort, they're probably happy to see blumassgroup occupy its front page with something so inconsequential this late in the game.
You would have to be dumb as a post to sit through an entire interview thinking they were talking about someone else's great grandfather, but they were really talking about yours. Brown's not the brightest bulb, but he's no where near that oblivious (especially about thing that effect him directly)
He obviously did it to gain pub, and it's an early indication of Brown's dishonest nature. Being dishonest about your personal background is a serous thing- and frankly is the kind of thing that could be a huge problem in something like a Senate confirmation. He doesn't belong in the Senate- for this reason, and many others.
I somehow doubt they spent much of the interview talking about Prentice Rugg.
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