John Henry. Photo by Webjedi, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Being a billionaire has its perks. With a private jet you don’t have to deal with long airport security lines, and a chauffeur will be at your beck and call all the time. You have assistants for everything from walking the dog to walking you into a doctor’s appointment.
People fawn over you, women half your age want to date you, and after a while you’ve convinced yourself it’s all due to your good looks and charm, even though you’re pushing 70.
Being a liberal billionaire in a liberal town has all this, and more. Much more. With the Liberal monogram on your forehead you can pretty much get what you want, when you want, sometimes without even buying it.
Welcome to the world of John Henry, our resident liberal billionaire who went from speculating on soybeans in not-so-liberal Arkansas, to lording over the Red Sox and the iconic liberal Boston Globe in oh-so-liberal Boston.
Mr. Henry, as he is called by his doting minions, is not only business-savvy, but also lucky. Lucky in that the Red Sox came up for sale at about the same time that Henry was looking to bolt from his then-Florida Marlins baseball team in the polarizing jumble of greater Miami, with throngs of Republican Cubans on the one side and enough working class Dems on the other side to confuse any politician, liberal or conservative.
Not exactly a good fit for a liberal billionaire in waiting.
So John Henry did a reverse migration to the bluest corner of the Northeast and landed in the liberal mecca of Boston, where Republicans are about as welcome as Yankees fans. That Henry teamed up with uber-liberal Hollywood producer Tom Werner to purchase the Red Sox was merely icing on the tofu cake to his soon-to-be liberal Boston comrades, who eagerly applauded his tutelage over the beloved home team.
To his credit Henry spent lots of money recruiting lots of talent to propel the Red Sox to three World Series titles in little over a decade of his taking the reins. The team nearly tripled in value, making it one of the most lucrative sports enterprises in the world.
Ever the liberal capitalist, John Henry became so rich he was even able to circumvent local zoning rules to buy adjoining estates in Brookline to make one huge English-manor type of estate for him to lord over.
With money to burn and a passion for all things liberal, he jumped on the fire sale of the Boston Globe. For a measly $70 million and change, he scooped up the liberal newspaper-of-record in New England in October 2013, then sold off its Morrissey Boulevard headquarters, more than recouping his money spent on his teetering acquisition.
Like fellow liberal kingpin Jeff Bezos, who finagled the Washington Post in a comparable yard sale, John Henry now had full ownership of the loudest liberal mouthpiece north of Central Park.
Yet, with running a major sports franchise, a top-rated English soccer team, a racing car enterprise, and other money-making entities we can only guess at, there was barely time left over to be the typical hands-on publisher of a major newspaper, even though it’s probably a given he really wanted to do just that.
So what’s a liberal billionaire to do?
Enter Mrs. Henry, aka Lucky Linda from Lynnfield. The third Mrs. Henry, a thirty-something gal from the aforementioned town, with little to no newspaper experience, but with the prerequisite liberal passion of her geriatric mega-rich hubby, was bestowed with the title of Managing Editor of the Boston Globe.
With trusted wifey now at the helm and unlimited cash to keep the Globe afloat — and Mrs. Henry happily employed — the farm boy from Arkansas and his doting bride quickly morphed from Mr. and Mrs. Red Sox to the First Couple of liberal Boston.
The Henry duo set about to elevate (or rather, degrade) the Boston Globe into one of the most left-wing newspapers in the country, on a par with the Washington Post, and exceeding even the liberal bias of the New York Times (the parent company of which sold the Globe to Henry).
To do that they needed a bogeyman to target in order to rile up their liberal readership, or at the very least to keep them within their dwindling circulation tent. In Donald Trump the Henrys found the Darth Vader they were looking for to show the liberal world how liberal they truly are.
And they’ve gone after then-candidate, and now President, Donald Trump ever since. Nary a day goes by without the Globe, or rather, the Henrys, bashing the President on his economic policy, diplomacy, appointments, rhetoric, family, wife, hair, suntan. You name it. If it has to do with The Donald, it’s bashable.
And oh how the liberals love ‘em for that. The Henrys have become the toast of liberal Boston, the darlings of the Democrats.
John Henry’s Boston Globe is so far to the left it’s more akin to the Village Voice or the now-defunct Boston Phoenix. Even its alleged conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby, is a RINO Never Trumper. Barely several times a year they’ll let Mike Stopa, a 2016 Trump RNC Delegate, publish something pro-Trump, after which they’ll spend the next week redoubling their efforts to degrade the President.
Yet even with the Boston Globe — and for that matter, much of the liberal print media — losing subscribers as well as untold dollars of advertising revenue, Boston Magazine, the liberal monthly magazine, picked Linda Henry as its most influential Bostonian.
To reward the dubious tenure of the managing editor of a fading newspaper would be odd even to the most uninformed (read, liberal) observer, except for the fact that Lucky Linda is the queen bee of her liberal billionaire husband’s plaything called the Boston Globe.
And besides, with all John Henry’s money, coupled with the premise that he’d like to keep his liberal minions happy, not to mention his wife, the Globe will undoubtedly be one of the last newspapers in America still standing.
Would that the Boston Herald had such a cash flow that only a billionaire can provide.
Thus, it’s a given that with the dual power of the Red Sox and Boston Globe, John Henry can get whatever he wants in town. Even to the point of changing the names of streets.
As is a habit of rich liberals, Henry seeks to demonstrate to the world that he’s more liberal than liberal, Arkansas farm boy be damned. To do that he reached into the forlorn past when Tom Yawkey, also a Southerner, owned the Red Sox. Rumors from a half century ago or more have pegged Mr. Yawkey, founder of the Jimmy Fund, as a relentless, heartless racist who couldn’t bear the thought of black baseball players on his Red Sox. How this meshes with the reality of such iconic Red Sox stars as Reggie Smith, George Scott, and Luis Tiant, Henry won’t say.
What he will say is that Tom Yawkey was a racist, so Yawkey Way must revert to its prior Jersey Street name in order to show the world that the Henrys and the Red Sox are against racism.
Got that?
Leave it to a leftie billionaire to manufacture such nonsense. Problem is, the city is doing his bidding. So now, not content with purging Tom Yawkey at Fenway Park, which he’s done with a fanatical zeal, Henry has convinced City Hall that the street at Fenway’s entrance must be cleansed of the Yawkey name.
Officials who run the Yawkey Foundation, Jimmy Fund, and the various hospitals with Yawkey wings are resisting the purge. But if John Henry ever runs them, it will happen.
Still, let’s face it: Jersey Street, the new-old name of Yawkey Way, is rather mundane. And it doesn’t even solve the alleged-racism problem. Surely there must be a more fitting name for the little public road that parallels the first base line of the field of the team which Mr. Henry leads so valiantly? Perhaps the name of a legendary Red Sox player? Pesky Way? Yastrzemski Street?
In a perfect world the non-liberal multitudes would boycott the Red Sox and turn Fenway Park into an empty echo chamber. But that’s not going to happen. The Red Sox are a revered sports institution and will continue to be so long after the Reign of the Henrys.
Hopefully, the same can not be said of the Boston Globe.
Tom Mountain is a Massachusetts Republican State Committeeman from Newton, Massachusetts.
John Henry. Photo by Webjedi, courtesy of Wikipedia. 
