I had decided to title this post, "Mooch, We Hardly Knew Ye," thinking myself clever albeit a bit hackneyed, but still right on target. But when I Googled the phrase to learn its origin, I found at least seven other bloggers and a few newspaper columnists had used the exact headline, so I scrapped it. That got me wondering even more about who first said it, and I was surprised to find it wasn't from Shakespeare, which I had always believed -- something about a guy named Yorrick. But no, it was not. Turns out nobody knows for sure.
There are several possibilities, but I thought the best answer for the source of the expression is an old Irish song, "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye," a woman's mournful message to her husband who lost both legs in battle. Another possibility was the best-selling book and the subsequent movie based on it with the same title, about John F. Kennedy's first run for a congressional seat in 1946. Whatever. The bottom line is, "Ding, dong, the Witch is dead!"
I for one am greatly relieved. It's bad enough having a Pixar cartoon for President, but that Mooch guy was too much like one of Tony Soprano's henchmen to be taken seriously. (Not that any of those political types can be taken seriously.) Mooch, or The Mooch as he liked to call himself, was a clown and now he's gone and that's a good thing. Still, I'm betting there are more clowns coming.
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