At the end of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits return from their battle with ultimate evil to find it necessary to vanquish some vestiges in their country home, the Shire.  I’m hoping this election season ends up to be something like that.

Depending on your city or town, the 2012 election may have left you under three layers of bad government.  The Obama Administration has proven to be more ideological, partisan, and (worst) incompetent than even most of us early skeptics feared.  The fruits of Rhode Island government under the General Assembly and Lincoln Chafee (who is still governor, I believe, although it doesn’t seem like it) are impossible to ignore.

And in Tiverton, we’ve had scandal after scandal, failure to oversee employees competently, and a regular practice of back-room decisions and subversion of government processes for political reasons.

Video of a hostile, uncomfortable Town Council meeting, last week, caps off the experience of the last two years.  Among the many scandals has been the council’s determination to appoint a specific person to the role of full-time town planner, even though budgets are tight, the voters did not approve enough money for the planning office for a full-time position, the anointed person lacks the credentials, and the Personnel Board did not include her among the finalists.  In the course of this battle, two members of the Personnel Board left, and three people have volunteered to fill the slots, one of them the wife of Town Council President Edward Roderick.

Another of the three volunteers is resident Donna Cook (also running for Budget Committee).  The day that she was scheduled to interview for the position, Council Member Jay Lambert, who has been on the council with Roderick for quite a while, called Cook on the phone and suggested that she should consider some other volunteer position in town.

Each party to that conversation tells it a little differently.  Cook says Lambert suggested that she withdraw her application to the Personnel Board, leaving a clear, uncontroversial path for the president’s wife.  Calling her “a liar” (but choosing his other words with a lawyer’s skill), Lambert presents it more as a friendly suggestion that she help the council fill the many vacancies.

I believe Mrs. Cook.  You can watch the seven-minute video yourself, but it’s apparent to me that Roderick — who tried to have her physically removed from the podium almost the moment she began speaking — had prior knowledge of the call and that the majority of the council at least had some sense of what was going on.

Sadly, I imagine these scenes are playing out across Rhode Island and the United States after the last election.  We might have to reverse Tolkien’s tale and clean things up from the Shire in.