COVER-UP OF HISTORICAL PROPORTIONS

Nothing spells trouble like secrecy, piled on top of $75,000 in state money wasted on a sinecure for a "historian" who isn't one, and a "history" that wasn't one, and which didn't get written anyway, and would have possibly amounted to no more than a piece of publicly financed flattery for the Speaker of the NC House, who isn't now going to be Speaker of the NC House any more, but whose abuse of that office just keeps giving off waves of rankness.

We hope that Joe Hackney -- who, far as we can tell, had nothing to do with this mess -- can find a way to dispose of it without appearing to shield guilty parties from the embarrassment they have evidently worked hard to earn.