If I can make it there. . . .

After a blissful spell of quietude, New York State politics is back on the front burner, and as usual it is so depressing as to make us wonder precisely how we are superior to Arizona or Louisiana.

First, there’s Charlie ‘Four-Rent-Stabilized-Apartments in Harlem’ Rangel who doesn’t realize that he’s a laughingstock and clings to office instead of repairing to his Caribbean resort to sit irrelevantly on a beach. Not that many people in his safe district (in which I reside) are up in arms about how he blew four decades of seniority on vanity projects and corruption just when he could have brought whole hog farms of federal pork to the recession-blasted city.

On top of that, we have been forcefully reminded of our goofball Governor, David Paterson a.k.a. Alfred E. Newman—who successfully stonewalled the investigation into his own and others’ appalling conduct when his driver/bodyguard beat [below] up a girlfriend last October.

Paterson was already scraping the bottom of the approval-polls barrel, but when we learned that he had called up the victim in a blatant attempt to intimidate her out of her domestic violence complaint, he was forced to abandon his joke of a re-election campaign. But four months later he’s unapologetic and now says he regrets having dropped out.

The sorry details of the incident are here and here, but suffice it to say that Paterson is a Harlem/Democratic Party machine pol who grew up privileged and thinks he’s special. You’d think in a city where the black population faces such grave problems that there would emerge a class of black political leaders occasionally interested in solving them rather than cashing in on all the goodies that come with office. But you would be wrong.