MYSTERY SOLVED BY LITERATURE

I have spent a good deal of time trying to decide how people like Toad Kennedy, Scott Brown, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Judy Gregg, Christopher Dodd, and Barney Frank can be elected, sometimes for decades of terms, when their ideals seem about as consistent with the U.S. Constitution as those of Mao Tze Tung - or however that's transliterated these days.

Quite unexpectedly I found a compelling explanation, almost as if addressed to my question, in a 1928 story, "The Dunwich Horror," by Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

"Perhaps one reason ... is that the natives are now repellantly decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity."

Wow! Just think, too, that New Englanders have had over 80 additional years for decline and degeneration! Keep in mind, finally, that our present BADministration is populated and controlled by Harvard - that's in New England, isn't it? - villains.

Posthumous thanks to H.P. for clarifying the issue.