Lowlights Magazine for (Grown) Children
Read on to find out how Andrew Cuomo ended up as Goofus and Bill de Blasio as Gallant. (And contrary to the headline the Daily News put on this one, there’s now a rulebook corrupt pols can play by to avoid paying any price for their corruption.)
New York, where following rules is for suckers - New York Daily News
Years ago, a Porteño friend picked me up at the airport in Buenos Aires, where every car driver seemed determined to win a game of chicken against motorized bikes driving in all directions across streets and sidewalks long before that became common in New York City.
Years ago, a Porteño friend picked me up at the airport in Buenos Aires, where every car driver seemed determined to win a game of chicken against motorized bikes driving in all directions across streets and sidewalks long before that became common in New York City.
As we talked and I took the city in, we approached, at high speed, a busy intersection with no apparent lights or signs. I screwed up my courage and asked: “Who yields?”
“The weak,” she laughed, accelerating as she turned her head from the road to look at me while I looked at the traffic she was driving straight toward.
Here in New York, “the weak” turns out to be Andrew Cuomo, who just four months ago was the state’s political alpha male, a status he’d spent a decade ferociously maintaining.
But with accusations of personal misconduct mounting, Cuomo asked for an outside investigation to try and buy himself time.
Now, the lifelong politician is whining from the sidelines about people “playing politics” as the intentionally broken Albany ethics commission he created and whose staffers approved his $5.1 million book deal without even consulting the commissioners are now trying to make him give the money back.
And Bill de Blasio, who Cuomo spent seven-and-a-half years tormenting for pleasure and sometimes also out of principle, is preparing to run for governor.
De Blasio spent most of his first term with a possible criminal indictment for corrupt fundraising hanging over his head, until the feds announced they wouldn’t charge him while also going out of their way to publicly scold him for violating the spirit of the law.
He’d lucked out timing-wise, since in the middle of the feds’ investigation the Supreme Court moved the goalposts back when they ruled in 2016 that politicians are free to take gifts from “friends” with business before the public so long as they don’t commit an “official act” in exchange.
The lesson for smart pols was that public corruption is no longer a crime so long as you’re competent enough to consult an attorney, dot your i’s and cross your t’s.
With the legal cloud cleared, de Blasio breezed into a second term he spent walking between raindrops as another group of people bribing him went to prison for doing so while he wasn’t even charged with taking their bribes.
That story involved a perfect tabloid combination of corrupt creeps with a direct line to the mayor paying off dirty cops with prostitutes. But with a lame-duck mayor who wasn’t charged and didn’t have to testify at the trial, the public mostly tuned it out.
De Blasio again insisted he did everything by the book, but that says more about what’s wrong with the book than it does about him.
(Philip Banks — who traveled around the world with de Blasio’s bribers when he was the NYPD chief of department widely seen as de Blasio’s commissioner in waiting and who stored their diamonds in his safe at One Police Plaza — has also stressed since abruptly resigning from the department in 2014 shortly before all that emerged that he did everything by the book and was never charged with a crime or even questioned though he was identified by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator.
He’s now back at One Police Plaza, where he’s avoided the press while working for the Adams transition team and helped pick the new police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, ahead of his own possible appointment as deputy mayor for public safety.)
This month, we learned that the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board blasted de Blasio twice for creating the “appearance of coercion and improper access” by reaching out directly to people with business before the city and asking them to give to his political operation. They wrote him about that in 2014, for the scheme the Supreme Court helped get him off the legal hook for, and again in 2018 as he kept at it.
The mayor fought a legal battle for two years to keep the public from learning about those letters telling him that “A public servant who engages in solicitations such as these…acts in conflict with that public servant’s official duties.”
When the news finally came out, he said it was fine, nothing to see here since he did that corruption by the book: “The script was delineated. I followed those scripts. We acted in good faith throughout this effort.”
In this Lowlights Magazine for New York pols, Andrew Cuomo is Goofus, who in agreeing to be investigated yielded and made himself disposable and was indeed disposed of. And Bill de Blasio, of all people, is Gallant, following the rules, admitting to nothing and daring people to knock him off the top of the hill.
In a city or a traffic system that functions, people have a good sense before they reach an intersection about who should yield. Without that, prepare for “accidents” — which should be called “crashes,” since many of them are the result of reckless actions — ahead.
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