If you found yourself feeling schadenfreude at the abysmally poor showing of Mary Mayhew in the Republican gubernatorial primary, you’re not alone.

Mayhew, unlike her opponents, has a mark forever attached to her that cannot, nor should not, ever be erased.

That mark has two names: Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy. Two little girls tortured while Mayhew oversaw the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, and then eventually tortured to death. Two little girls let down completely by what we like to call a civilized society.

If I’m right, Mayhew is a lot like her former boss and benefactor, Paul LePage. That means that, after her failed attempt at the Blaine House, she’s likely to spend all of her time angling for a paycheck somewhere in the bowels of the useless, teeming bureaucracy in either Augusta or Washington, D.C. “Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of The Department of This-Or-That.” “Deputy Adjunct to the Deputy Director Something or Other.” A plump paycheck, a nice pension and a few hundred more square feet added to the house.

The people directly responsible for the deaths of those two little girls will likely rot in prison for the rest of their lives. Deservedly so. But those indirectly responsible, those who failed at the basic functions of not only their jobs, but also their duties as human beings in a civil society, will go largely without repercussion.

I’ll write those two little girls’ names again: Kendall Chick and Marissa Kennedy.

At least the voters in Maine’s Republican primary threw some much-deserved rain on Mary Mayhew’s parade.

Jeremy Smith

Old Orchard Beach

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