William Magear Tweed

That don't make no difference.

Not if you was Boss Tweed from Tammany Hall.

Madame Tetroni hasn't left the boat yet, has she?

There ain't no blamed Italian on this here boat.

It is hard to take the lottery seriously, for the day when it was worthy of abuse has passed away, and indeed there are few men or measures so important as to deserve abuse, while there is no measure if it be for good so insignificant that it is not deserving the exertion of a good word or a line of praise and gratitude.

And only the emotion one can feel for the lottery now is the pity which you might have experienced for William M. Tweed when, as a fugitive from justice, he sat on the beach at Santiago de Cuba and watched a naked fisherman catch his breakfast for him beyond the first line of breakers, or that you might feel for Monte Carlo, were it to be exiled to a fever-stricken island off the swampy coast of West Africa, or to pay the lottery a very high compliment indeed, that which you give to that noble adventurer exiled to the Isle of Elba.

There was something almost pathetic to me in the sight of this great, arrogant gambling scheme that had in its day brought the good name of a state into disrepute, that had boasted of the prices it paid for the honor of men, and that had robbed a whole nation, willing to be robbed, spinning its wheel in the back room in a hot, half-barbarous country, and to an audience of gaping Indians and unwashed Honduran generals.

Sooner than fall as low as that, it would seem to be better to fall altogether, to own that you are beaten, that the color has gone against you too often, and like that honorable gambler and gentleman, Mr. John Oakhurst, who struck a streak of bad luck above the middle of February 1864, to put a pistol to your head and go down as arrogantly and defiantly as you had lived.

You know, the city's huge.

Again, those rules exist because if you go back to Boss Tweed, right, back in the 1800s, Let me all.

There you go.

All right.

You know, it's even more important to keep up appearances when you're undermining what you purport to be your own commitment to peace and aversion to escalation.

I mean, what did Boss Tweed say? Appearance of the law is fundamental, especially when it's being broken.

I mean, this shouldn't seem like outlandish to anybody, okay? But there's so much dishonesty around the issue.

That's why I emphasize that.

So in the 1800s, there was a political cartoonist in America named Thomas Nast at a magazine called Harper's Weekly right after the Civil War.

And And if you've ever seen these old kind of post-Civil War political cartoons in America, Boss Tweed or whatever, that was Thomas Nast.

But in 1871, he starts publishing all of these anti-Catholic cartoons because you had immigrants coming over, the Italians and the Irish and others that were coming over to America, and they were bringing their Catholicism.

Thomas Nast represented the sort of Protestant mainline in America that was against these Catholic immigrants and how they were going to undermine the country and destroy America and everything else.

Morning, chat.

Uh, morning, Terry Murnane, uh, Jazzy Chaz, Kenneth Flores, Detective Nolan, of course, KBNYC, Boss Tweed, 92Charlie, JeffY6YIZ.

Uh, who else we got? A Steven S, Doug Wynn.

Right.