HARRY SIEGEL
October 22, 2016
In a horror-film-worthy climax, the nasty woman, roughed up but still standing, has her foot on the bad hombre’s neck as he thrashes on the floor.
Even before the credits roll and despite a disturbing number of unresolved subplots threatening still darker sequels, it’s a deeply satisfying moment. The Master of Projection — the monster who vowed to destroy all monsters, the unworthy American who re-cast himself from TV jerk to the Republican presidential candidate by accusing the true President of being everything ugly that he is — finally exposed and far from huge, sniffing into microphones and pissing into the wind.
So America is ready to exhale, and taking stock of what we’ve lost focus on while our eyes were pinned on the guy crying about once-great America’s dumb, crooked leaders while joking about shooting people on Fifth Ave. (And now would be the time! Like he keeps asking “the blacks”: “What do you have to lose?”)
There really are an awful lot of crooked places outside of Trump Tower. A quick survey of some of what is, in fact, going on around and about New York:
Start in Nassau, where County Executive Ed Mangano was charged by the feds Thursday in a you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up corruption scheme involving, among other things, $450,000 for a no-show job for his wife as a “restaurant taster” that allegedly came in exchange for giving a restaurateur lucrative government contracts to provide bread and rolls to prisoners and food to emergency workers in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
The Republican who took office as a reformer but promptly began using his $3 billion budget as a patronage operation is now charged with selling out his nearly 1.5 million constituents to get, among other things, new hardwood floors installed in his home declares that he’ll “continue to govern. America is the greatest country in the world and you’ll have the opportunity to decide for yourself.”
Jump to City Hall, where Mayor de Blasio keeps using dubious legal explanations and the many overlapping criminal and civil probes of his administration to his political advantage in ducking inconvenient questions on everything from the Administration for Children’s Services’ failure to save the life of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins to his own communications with lobbyists.
The man New Yorkers entrust with a $82 billion budget has yet to deliver the failed-bribe list he bizarrely promised back in May of all the people who gave money to his various political operations and then didn’t receive what they asked for from his administration.
Which ain’t supposed billionaire Trump hiding his tax returns behind supposed IRS audits, but it sure ain’t good.
To put it in de Blasian terms, the mayor seems to think he’s created an historic, transcendent new form of honest graft, since public money isn’t flowing into government officials’ pockets but instead into those of outside operators who fund and support his progressive political machine.
Back to traditional corruption, Gov. Cuomo, who heavily influences the Joint Commission on Public Ethics that’s going after de Blasio, has seen three members of his tight inner circle hit with charges of using their official positions to line their own pockets.
The infamous micromanager with a $155 billion state budget (plus billions more in off-books authorities he controls) says he’s saddened and stunned, stunned at what two longtime family associates, one of whom is now cooperating with prosecutors, did while working for his administration, complete with cut-rate Sopranos references to “fat boys” and “ziti.”
Maybe Cuomo could commiserate on one of his frequent calls with his $10 billion Port Authority patronage partner and fellow prosecutor turned governor across the Hudson, Chris Christie. You know, the guy who cracks jokes at 9/11 memorials about the first responders stranded in a traffic disaster ginned up by the Port Authority to punish his political enemies.
What Cuomo knew, and when, remains one of the many outstanding questions as the Bridgegate trial draws to a close and Christie himself — who, incredibly, prosecutors and defense attorneys in the federal trial of his former aides agree knew about the appalling man-made disaster — faces the prospect of his own charges from Bergen County prosecutors.
Cut to Christie’s old friend Donald, nursing his wounds amidst his Baath décor-themed apartment atop the gold tower with his name spelling TRUMP in huge, classy letters. Perhaps he’ll spare a stubbly-thumbed Tweet for these crooked losers as he broods and schemes about reinvention and revenge.
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