Leave Bruno Alone

Dear Federal Prosecutors:

I read more and more about the possibility of a federal government shutdown and all that would mean to the people, whether the people like to acknowledge it or not. I also read about our large federal budget deficit, the looming necessity to increase the federal debt ceiling, and, perhaps worst of all, the possibility that some Republicans will decide to oppose raising that ceiling, never-mind the catastrophe that would cause.

And in the midst of all this I also read that you, federal prosecutors, are looking to retry now-former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno. You have convicted him once on some charges, but lost other charges to an acquittal. His convictions were in effect overturned by the United States Supreme Court's understandable concerns about the law he was convicted under.

The federal government's damaged finances may appear unrelated to the ongoing efforts to put Joe Bruno in jail. But consider this undeniable fact: Prosecutions cost money. And for now we're only talking about the costs to the government and thus, indirectly, to the taxpayers. We are leaving aside the costs to middle class people who will be dragged into court, again, to testify.

Focusing only on the government's costs, as a taxpayer in the United States, I plead with you: Leave Joe Bruno alone. It's just not worth the money anymore.

I do not make this plea because I like Bruno, or because I consider the efforts you made against Bruno to have been entirely wasted.

While I began looking at this matter as a Bruno supporter, that eroded. Thanks in part to your efforts, to your previous semi-successful prosecution, I was able to see that Bruno surely was corrupt in some sense, despite my early support of him. You were clearly not prosecuting Joe Bruno for being Joe Bruno, as Roger Stone had suggested and as I'd initially feared. Even if Bruno's corruption didn't quite cross the line into illegality, he came close enough for me. Your prosecution thus highlighted Bruno's corruption and the way in which State law is lax enough that Bruno probably managed to not break any State laws while he was being corrupt. In other words, a federal prosecution highlighted the need for a better, more reasonable State law. While this isn't the primary purpose of a federal prosecution, at least I hope it is not, it is a valuable purpose, and I honor it.

By mostly failing, your previous prosecution also unintentionally highlighted that it was indeed possible to be a business consultant and a State Legislator at the same time. Bruno was, generally speaking, acquitted on charges related to consulting work he'd done that was in fact legitimate consulting work or at least appeared to be so. Where his problem came was treading in the gray area between legitimate consulting and influence peddling. A consultant-legislator who actually has consulted would appear to not be in much danger.

At least after Bruno was mostly acquitted, anyway.

Your prosecution, however, has already served the only good purposes it can. Please leave Bruno alone now. It is simply not worth your time and taxpayer money, my money, to keep going after him. Not in the age of a huge federal budget deficit, a looming government shutdown, and worst of all the distant but real possibility that some of Joe Bruno's fellow Republicans may decide to make the most irresponsible possible decision and block the increase of the debt ceiling. Joe Bruno hasn't been in power for years. He will never be in power again. It is just a waste of taxpayer money, a commodity in ever-shorter supply, to keep going after him.

It's time to let go. Spend my money going after other crimes. Make sure you convict Senator Carl Kruger. Go after lawyer-legislators, like John Sampson and Sheldon Silver, whose legal work may not be any more real than you accused Bruno's consulting work of being. Use the precious, dwindling resources the people give to you to investigate people currently in power. Not to keep up after people you've already gone after oncem haven't been in power for years, and likely won't ever be in power again..

There is simply no longer any money to spare for fishing expeditions, or for vendettas. And, honestly, a vendetta is what this is starting to look like.

Please stop and let it go. There just isn't any money for this anymore.

Sincerely,
The Albany Exile
(a taxpayer)

Honest Lawyers

Where, I wonder, are all the corrupt lawyers.

Of the various New York State politicians who have been credibly accused or convicted of various corruption charges of late, only one that I can think of, former State Senator Vincent Leibell, was a lawyer, and what he did was an old-fashioned mafia-style shakedown more than it was anything actually political.

Neither Carl Kruger nor William Boyland are lawyers. Nor Joe Bruno, nor Shirley Huntely, nor Vito Lopez, nor Shirley Huntley, nor Tony Seminerio. None of these people are described as lawyers in their official biographies, and they are not listed in the Office of Court Administration's attorney directory.

I suppose I might have missed another scandal involving a lawyer-legislator. There have been so many scandals, losing track is easy. Assuming I haven't, though, one could think that lawyer-legislators are probably the most honest and least corrupt. While that may be true, I don't think it's the reason comparatively few of them are either convicted of or credibly charged with crimes.

Many, but not all, of the allegedly corrupt legislators have been accused of variants on the same crime, which is using fake “consulting” firms to in essence funnel bribes collected for performing legislative work. In these arrangements, little or not actual consulting work is done. If I recall Joe Bruno's convictions correctly, he was acquitted when the jury thought he was doing real consulting work and convicted when they thought he wasn't. So it's not like there's no way to be a business consultant and a legislator at the same time. One just has to, you know, actually consult.

An old saying in Albany goes something like, “you don't bribe a legislator anymore, you hire his law firm.” It's only been pretty recently that we could add, “or you hire him as a business consultant.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is “of counsel” at a prominent law firm, as is Senate Minority Leader John Sampson. Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos also has a law firm, exactly what his title and role are I don't know. How many people with business before New York State, we wonder, have hired one, or all, of those firms. And is any real legal work done.

Has anyone looked? Maybe they have. But my distinct impression is that lawyers are potentially given a free pass for no-show work because they are lawyers.

I'm not saying legislators' law firms are hired for no-show work. I'm saying that, the way the rules are written and interpreted, they could easily be.

The rules are written, mostly, by lawyers, and are enforced by other lawyers who are called prosecutors and judges. Lawyers like to hide behind the concept of lawyer-client confidentiality. Other professionals, such as business consultants, security consultants, or private detectives, clearly do not deserve the same considerations that lawyers have, or at least so say the lawyers who write the rules. Lawyers, you see, can think in boxes. Therefore, surely a lawyer-legislator won't be influenced by, say, the Trial Lawyers' Association or one of the Koch Brothers' businesses hiring his firm for big legal fees.

But those businessmen. You have to watch out for them. Surely, they will be influenced by those big consulting fees.

I understand of course that lawyer-client confidentiality is important; but is it really any more important than consultant-client confidentiality, when it starts to rub against public trust? Does a legislator's bank account know the difference between a legal fee and a consulting fee?

There is simply no good reason to hold legal fees as more sacrosanct than consulting fees. Both can be used as a form of influence, and both probably are. There is no good reason to think that, in terms of influence peddling, a no-show legal job is any less dangerous or corrupt than a no-show business consulting job. We shouldn't allow a New York State Legislator to be more efficiently corrupt because he happened to go to law school as opposed to business school or accounting school.

There are, of course, several other signs that New York State doesn't take ethics seriously as a policy issue, but in a way this one is the most telling, and almost certainly the least-sung. In effect one profession is singled out. The legal profession is in essence excused from the kind of corruption that seems to be the most common these days. Not excused from committing it, I mean, but excused from being legally held accountable for it. In the strictest legal sense, lawyers can only be corrupt by going far out of their way to be so, like Vincent Leibell did.

Or so it seems.

Joe Bruno once stated that he'd pitched to Eliot Spitzer that ethics reform should include full disclosure of all outside income for legislators, including lawyer-legislators, but that Spitzer balked at the inclusion of lawyers.

New York must take ethics seriously if it is to bother proceeding at all. It needs to start with putting all outside income for legislators on an equal footing, if outside income is to be allowed at all. (And if it's not you need to at least double the legislators' legislative pay and tie it to the inflation rate.)

When I hear about a potential Moreland Act Commission to deal with the issue of ethics reform I get very nervous. A Moreland Act Commission is a blunt instrument by definition, and is beholden only to the Governor. But you know what? If such a Commission will take ethics seriously as an issue and have all options on the table, including ending the disparate treatment of lawyers and other professions?

Then I, for one, will take it.

Adult Supervision

“Wall Street,” a financial expert once said on National Public Radio, “needs adult supervision.” I have heard of something very similar said by some Wall Street guy or other, in the pages of the book The Big Short, one of several books about the financial crisis that I have yet to read but really should.

Basically, this Wall Street guy said that the financial industry kept doing what it did in-part because it kept expecting the adults to come in and stop it. "Surely the adults won't let us play this dangerously forever," the thinking went. But then the financial industry realized that there aren't any adults anymore. Along very similar lines, note this New York Times' interview with grandmaster Wall Street con artist Bernie Madoff. Madoff claims it likely that the banks had to have caught onto what he was doing, and chose to look the other way.

The need for adult supervision isn't confined to Wall Street. Albany is a city which seems to be almost entirely devoid of adult supervision. Come to that, the oil industry doesn't seem to have many adults either. Nor does the auto industry. To pick but one glaring example, it shouldn't have taken Congress, or the ever-reliable mainstream media, to point out that showing up to ask for money in your own private jet sends entirely the wrong message. That's a child's mistake, not an adult's.

The debt collection industry is another example. A series of articles and documentary films have convinced me that this industry is largely made up of overgrown children, pretending to be pirates. I didn't make that comparison up. It came straight from the mouth of a debt collector quoted in the documentary film Maxed Out. Similarly, the Fall 2010 newsletter of the New York State Collectors' Association termed “ridiculous” a bill introduced in the New York State Legislature that would prevent the collection of debts from the dead. Only someone who doesn't know the debt industry would be surprised by the thought of a collector attempting to collect from the family of a corpse. The Association similarly opposed vociferously a bill that would require debt collectors to be (gasps in horror!) licensed. How dare adults try to spoil our fun!

Adult supervision.

When the British Petroleum oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico, I, like Roger Ebert, was struck by the incredible degree to which attempts to get BP to clean up after its own mess were taken by Fox News and the like as an attack on the capitalist system itself. Did this remind anyone else of a chastised child claiming “it's not fair” and then running to a neighbor or a favored uncle? What, I wonder, would the hue and cry have been if regulators had stepped in to try and stop Bernie Madoff?

Are there no more adults? Consider this. It's not like financial regulators did not exist even before recent changes to the system. Madoff had to do filings with them; in the New York Times interview cited above, Madoff expresses surprise that no one caught onto the discrepancies in his filings. It's not like Albany politicians don't have to do filings. Indeed, filings were a menace to Senator Pedro Espada even before the potential extent of his corruption was authoritatively established. And it's not like debt collectors don't already have rules to follow.

Adult supervision exists on Wall Street, and in Albany, and in the debt collection industry. It probably exists in the auto industry and oil industry as well. I wonder if it isn't that there are no adults, but rather that the children have merely figured out ways to hide from them. I read of changes to the financial industry regulatory system, changes which are surely needed. I read of ethics reform proposals in Albany. I read of private lawsuits against debt collectors, and of an New York State Attorney General crackdown on the industry. And then I read that, at the same time that the Attorney General is investigating debt collectors, he's also hiring them.

If I am right, and it isn't that there are no more adults so much as the children are quite adept at evading the adults, then all the additional supervision in the world is simply may not matter.

Not on Wall Street, not when the debt collector is pounding on your door, and surely not in Albany.

Zero Effect: The Arizona Shootings

It wouldn't surprise me whatsoever if the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords by Jared Loughner was politically motivated. And that's the picture that's starting to emerge. (Mr. Loughner shot others besides Representative Giffords, of course, but Giffords was his primary target, so I refer to the incident as her shooting.)

Indeed, it would surprise me if the incident were NOT politically motivated. If it turned out it was merely the product of voices in the gunman's had, or if there were some old family grudge he thought he was settling, basically ANY non-political motivation, that's what would surprise me.

With all the violence inherent in today's politics, I refer to violent rhetoric and violent implied inclinations, it's surprising that such an incident hasn't happened sooner. And let me say something that isn't politically correct, but is true: This violence is mostly, almost exclusively, found on the right. The days of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, violence on the left, are for the moment long past. Perhaps the most-violent rhetoric from the left I've seen in awhile came from Eliot Spitzer, and we saw what happened to him.

Some folks wish this shooting to be what public policy scholar Thomas Birkland calls a “focusing event,” a moment that crystallizes the need for a change. Seen as a focusing event, presumably the shootings would focus our attention on the need to increase civility in our public discourse, to recognize that there's a difference between winning an election and “knocking you down,” as now-former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer so eloquently threatened to do to now-former New York State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Birkland was talking about a policy change following a focusing event, not a change in political tone or a process change, but the principle is the same in both cases.

And it sure would be nice if this shooting could serve some good. I'm tired of seeing the right portray President Obama as the Joker from Batman, or with a Nazi flag behind him. I'm tired of people bringing guns to meetings with their Representatives to protest the government giving them health care. I'm tired of people at rallies threatening to lynch the Attorney General of the United States. I'm tired of hearing the likes of G. Gordon Liddy advise people to shoot federal agents in the head. I'm tired of Newt Gingrich thinking he knows what a “normal American” is and who the enemy of those “normal Americans” are.

And, mostly, I'm tired of hearing Sarah Palin and Carl Paladino and those of their ilk use sex-laced, incendiary rhetoric and then hide behind the First Amendment when something bad happens. The First Amendment, after all, doesn't give one the right to yell fire in a crowded theater.

It would be nice if this shooting helped to end all that, helped to restore to America a conservative movement that not only understood that compromise was necessary but that praised the idea of compromise (as Ronald Reagan once did) and that understood your opponents could be friends after 6pm (as Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil claimed to be). But let's face it. Even if the shooting was politically motivated (which it may-yet turn out to not be), and even if that fact if true were undeniable (and, sadly, everything is deniable these days), it still wouldn't change anything. The shooting will not be a focusing event for anything.

The shootings by army psychologist Nidal Hasan were successfully directed into scrutiny on American Muslims, and logic suggests the Arizona incident will direct a similar scrutiny toward the right. But contemporary American politics, as the shooting itself ironically suggests, is not about logic.

The violent rhetoric of the right isn't new, and we've seen similar potential focusing events before. The Oklahoma City bombing; the Branch Davidians' madness at Waco Texas; the Olympic Centennial Park bombing; the anti-government Right Wing rhetoric and violence of the Unabomber; various abortion-related killings; the flying of an airplane into IRS offices in Texas; the shooting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; etc. All of these, and others, many others, were potential focusing events to change the increasingly ugly nature of our political discourse. But all were successfully redirected. Instead of focusing on militias, we focused on the alleged root cause of the militias: Bad government. Ironically, this is the same thought process, focusing on society and not the criminal as the root cause of crime, that the right has long decried when it's convenient for them, such as now, wherein we are told that Loughner is totally responsible for his own actions. The right wing insisted that we reach out to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics (as long as their actions can be somehow traced to spontaneous anger at the government itself, and not the result of things said by the political right) with sympathy and understanding, even as they explicitly denied similar considerations to gun-toting, economically-motivated urban street thugs. Or to gun-toting politically-motivated lunatics whose actions can in part be traced to violent political rhetoric.

And that's what'll happen this time. Nothing. Or, worse than nothing, the incident will somehow be used to cast scrutiny in the wrong direction.

The corrosive influence of Post-Modern philosophy on America's public life, once feared by the right, has become their greatest friend, because it enables them to sell us political goods we can't afford and have no good reason to buy. When all facts become opinions, it's the opinions of those with the biggest mouths and the most money that get to become facts again. And when all values are openly questioned, anger becomes the most-important value. Anger focuses, cuts through, motivates, intensifies. And, best of all, anger cheap to buy or manufacture.

The right, by far, has the most money (the Koch Brothers, unlike George Soros, aren't going to back down for fear of being misunderstood), the biggest mouths (conservative talk radio has reigned since the 1980s), and certainly the most anger. And if the anger already present isn't sufficient, the money can be used to buy more.

If Sarah Palin's pathetic, self-serving video, and her bizarre public E-Mail exchange with Glenn Beck, showed us anything, it's that the redirection process has already begun. And if the polls showing that Americans mostly think that the shootings in Arizona had nothing to do with politics are accurate, it may mean that the redirection process has already succeeded.

Zero effect. This, America, is the politics we're stuck with, the politics we've made. Focusing events may have no actual meaning.

On Legislative Staff

In a recent piece on Senator Leibell's ethical issues, I briefly mentioned Senator Leibell's staff. I wondered aloud if maybe one of Senator Leibell's problems was that he lacked staff with either the guts or the authority, or both, to tell him that what he was doing was both wrong, and stupid, and would harm all of them. (This of course assumes his staff had any idea what he was doing, and simply “knew better” than to call him on it. It might be the case, of course, that they had no idea at all.)

I was criticized for these remarks; I was accused of blaming Senator Leibell's problems on his staff. But I was doing no such thing.

Well, then was I saying that it was staff's responsibility to police the actions of the boss? Again, no, I wasn't. The responsibility for all legislators' actions, and all of a legislature's or legislative conference's actions as a collective body, falls on the legislators themselves.

What I was doing, however, was highlighting the important and oft-overlooked role of legislative staff. As a legislator, a good staff can, if you let them, save you from yourself, at least temporarily. (In the long run, of course, no one can save anyone from themselves. But staff can help in the short term.) Staff should be good enough, trusted enough, and have enough integrity to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, whether it's an unjustifiable policy choice, or an unethical or even an illegal action. Political trust between legislator and staff is important, yes. (Note, though, that political trust is not the same as political agreement.) But, at the end of the day, competence, intelligence, and guts are all more important than is political trust.

I should imagine that for a legislator one of the most tempting things in the world is to hire staff that will just stroke your ego, reenforce your ideology and your preconception, and find smart-sounding ways to simply confirm what you say. This is an understandable temptation that should be avoided.

It's incumbent upon legislators, individually for their offices and collectively for the house or conference, to build a good staff. To seek out people who know what they are doing, have integrity, and are unafraid. As the legislator, ultimately the decisions are yours, and staff should respect that. But the staff also shouldn't be afraid to tell you to your face, behind closed doors of course, that what you're doing is wrong. Whether it's a bad policy, or an unethical (or illegal) action. If you discourage staff from performing that critical function, or even worse if you initially hire staff who isn't inclined to perform it, you have done yourself, your constituency, your conference, your chamber, and your state a disservice.

Sadly, I have no impression that the New York State Legislature (I speak especially of the State Senate, which seems to make the news a lot more often) agrees with me. If they have the tough, smart, capable staff I envision, they keep it well-hidden, and seem to rarely or never listen to it. Bad policy and lack of ethics don't always, or even mostly, go hand-in-hand, but there are important linkages. Staff is one of those linkages.

I don't know for sure, of course, that Senator Leibell's staff didn't try to talk to him. Ditto for Senator Espada, Senator Bruno, Assembly Member Seminerio, or any of the others who have faced problems. It might be that in all these cases, staff tried to warn legislator, and legislator didn't listen. Or staff might have not known at all. (With Bruno at least, thanks to his trial, there's a record at least of what people say or claim went on, so someday perhaps I will obtain that record and see for myself. With the others, though, we may never know for sure.)

But with all the problems New York's state legislators have had of late, one wonders if part of it is that they are hiring folks who kiss up and kick down, John Bolton style, rather than the people they should be hiring. And indeed, there's actually some specific reasons to think that hiring bad staff might be part of the New York State Legislature's problem, at least as far as the Senate is concerned.

Our first example comes to us from the Senate Democrats. Under Democratic rule, the State Senate hired former disc jockey Christopher Sealey as “Director of Creative Services” (huh?), at a 2009 pay rate of about $92,000 a year. Published reports indicate that even he was surprised by his hire. Luckily, he's ended his State service entirely, and he can go back to being a disc jockey. I have no idea what he did for the Senate and I don't think he did either.

For our second example, we go to the Senate Republicans. Who could forget the bizarre E-Mail from Senator Dean Skelos' aide, Thomas Dunham, to then Senate employee Edward Lurie, which was sent in late 2008 and hit the news in early 2009, wherein Dunham blatantly plotted to use Senate research staff for electoral purposes? To do such a thing at all was bad enough, but Dunham also put it in E-Mail, apparently not aware that E-Mails sometimes get leaked. It was, thus, not enough for Dunham to do something wrong; he had to also do it stupidly. Despite this, Dunham continued to work for the Senate Republicans during their two-year stint in the minority, and in 2009, according to SeeThroughNY.net, he made $150,000 working for the Senate Minority. (Almost double what the Senate Democrats' disc jockey made.) One wonders how much he'll make in the Senate Majority.

For our third example we return to the Senate Democrats, and highlight the hiring of Senator Pedro Espada's son for a six-figure job, from which he was quickly removed after the hiring broke as a scandal, part of a small series of Senate Democratic hiring scandals.

Sadly, I have no impression these hires were atypical for the Senate. Any good people they may have hired have quite likely been simply drowned under the weight of the bad ones. It came as no surprise to me to read that the Senate Democrats had exceeded their staff budget by a considerable amount. It actually wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the Senate Republicans had done it too, but I've read nothing that says so.

Political Scientist Alan Rosenthal once wrote that legislative staffing is an important element in building the capacity of state legislatures. A more-prepared staff means a more-prepared legislature. Political Scientist Michael Malbin has argued that at the federal level, legislative staff (which of course at the federal level means Congressional staff) has become so important to the legislative process that it endangers the principle of representation.

After two years, a little more, really, of the least competent State Legislature that I am aware of (the Senate casting a terrifying shadow over the State Assembly), I think New Yorkers are probably ready for a legislative staff that endangers the principle of representation, if such also means a Legislature that is run well and enacts policies that have at least the semblance of being thought out.

Now, let's be clear: None of this is staff's fault. The legislators' actions are ultimately the legislators' responsibility, and that includes building up staff.

I have to wonder, though if anyone told the Legislators any different. Did anyone drag Vincent Leibell aside and say, “please don't do this?” Did anyone tell Eric Schneiderman, “this millionaires' tax....what you're saying on floor of the Senate greatly exaggerates its potential?” Even if staff didn't know about Leibell's lack of ethics they surely knew of Schneiderman's wild exaggerations on the Senate Floor. Did they say anything? Were they even allowed to?

Or of the State Legislature, especially the Senate, has simply been hiring people who will help keep up the bubble?

If so, that's the wrong approach. It hurts the effort to make public policy that there's at least a good argument for. And, it hurts the effort to change the bizarre culture of Albany, which it seems only gets worse with increasingly strict ethics reforms. There are two aspects of Albany's corrupt culture that are within the State Legislators' direct control: Their own behavior, and who they hire to watch their backs. Someone can't watch your back when he's afraid he'll get fired for yelling in your ear. Or if he lacks the capacity to recognize a threat when one appaers.

In many ways, the key to good legislative staffing is to resist the temptation to stuff your ranks with political loyalists, cronies, and those to whom you owe favors. (Or, those whose families you owe favors to.) Currently, one could be forgiven for suspecting that staffing at the New York State Legislature is little more than a patronage mill. There are a few internship programs (for undergraduate students) or fellowship programs (for graduate students), in both chambers, that attempt to draw individuals with actual qualifications into both houses of the Legislature. But these are small in scale compared to the problem itself.

If ethics and good policy (or at least justifiable policy) aren't enough too make the Legislature think twice about who it hires, then consider this.

Competition was an important buzz word in Andrew Cuomo's 2011 State of the State message. Based on what I have seen and heard at the capital, the Legislature's staff, especially the Senate (both Conferences), is simply unprepared to compete with Andrew Cuomo. They will need smart, tough, educated, prepared people in order to remain relevant over the next few years.

Gubernatorial behavior, Legislators, is not within your power to control. Your capacity to respond to it, however, is. Good staff is your sword and your shield.

What's Wrong With New York?

I've written about political corruption in Albany a few times in these pages. See here and here.

Mostly I concluded, and continue to conclude, that the issue is very complex, politicians' approaches to the issue have tended to infantilize it, and that no approach will succeed until the issue is taken seriously. Stricter rules, by themselves, are not an attempt to take the issue seriously. They are window dressing, at best, distractions at worst.

That corruption is rampant in Albany is something of a cliché at this point. Usually corruption is, like dysfunction, a code word for “the system didn't produce the results I wanted, therefore there must be something wrong with it.” Few, however, would disagree that the New York State Legislature has been corrupt and dysfunctional even apart from any results it has, or has not, produced! But I have to say I think there is a degree to which I didn't realize just how corrupt Albany was until I heard about the plight of now-former (as of Friday December 3, 2010) State Senator Vincent Leibell. See here and here.

From everything I have read and every insider I have spoken to (or listened to when it appeared I was not listening), Vincent Leibell would have stood an excellent chance of winning a “State Senator least likely to be corrupt” award, had such an award existed. If there were any indications until now that he was corrupt, I didn't see them in anything I read about him, and no one I ever spoke to or listened to had any inkling.

Did I miss something, I wonder? Did those whom I spoke to or listened to miss something? Perhaps. Maybe this wasn't a surprise to everyone, like it was to me.

Or, perhaps, things have gotten so bad in Albany that even whose who appear honest aren't.

After Leibell's troubles have come to light, the cliché that Albany (and the New York State Legislature in particular) is corrupt to the core seems to me to be less cliché than fact. I do not mean to say that every politician, or even every State Legislator, whose feet have ever touched Albany is corrupt; that would be a statistical implausibility. (I am no longer prepared to call anything impossible, but calling it implausible seems safe.) But I do mean that, after Vinnie Leibell's troubles came to light, I no longer feel safe in assuming that most of New York's public servants are honest, keep their noses as clean as the savage nature of political life will allow, and want to do good. I no longer believe that corruption isn't the norm. I no longer believe that Albany's “culture of corruption” is the product of too many bad apples whose actions have a very large ripple effect. Such beliefs, which I once considered realistic, now seem naïve.

In brief, after the revelations about Vinnie Leibell, I'm way more inclined to think that corruption is the norm.

Through a lot of reading on political ethics, I've realized something interesting and disturbing: The corruption in the New York State Legislature breaks many key expectations Political Scientists have about corruption in State Legislatures. Alan Rosenthal, a scholar from New Jersey, suggests we can expect State Legislatures to be less corrupt if they are professionalized, which New York's Legislature surely is. He also writes that by and large State Legislatures are less corrupt today (though technically when he wrote this it was in the 1990s) than they were in the 1960s. If this is true in New York I dread to think of the 1960s.

So what's going on? What's wrong with New York? What's going on that makes Alan Rosenthal, who has devoted a career to studying State politics, wrong in some of his key expectations (at least when it comes to New York)?

Another Political Scientist, Joseph F. Zimmerman (who teaches at SUNY Albany and, like Alan Rosenthal, has been investigating state politics for many years), suggests that an “individualistic” political culture, like New York's, promotes political corruption. While this may be true, he also suggests, rightly, that alternative political cultures can't be set up easily. And I would like to think that there are ways to stem corruption other than wholesale alterations of a State's political culture. New York State's individualism has had many positive effects which I would hate to lose.

Zimmerman also wrote that political corruption was “limited only by the ingenuity of the human mind.” Surely, and sadly, this is one way in which Political Science's expectations are not broken by the New York State experience.

From what I have heard and read of baseball during the 1980s and 1990s, if you were a baseball player back then, you faced a stark choice between using steroids and accepting a second-class status. Maybe that's the issue here as well. Maybe after seeing “everyone else” get away with so much, one feels stupid for not being corrupt.

Maybe the New York State Legislature, despite having a pretty large staff (the State Senate alone is a $100 million a year business and surely a good amount of that is staff), doesn't have the right kind of staff. Perhaps the staff is too politically minded, is too focused on finding problems that need to be solved and not focused enough on finding solutions to known problems, and perhaps telling the boss what he doesn't want to hear. (Another Political Scientist, Michael Malbin, describes a similar dynamic among Congressional staff. Now that I think about it, he's written about ethics too. And now that I think about it a little more, he teaches at SUNY Albany, along with Joseph Zimmerman).

One would think that someone on staff should have told Vinnie Leibell to not do whatever it was he was doing. Maybe no one felt comfortable saying no to the boss. Maybe he kept whatever he was doing to himself. Even had Leibell's actions not risen to the level of a federal crime, surely they would've looked bad. And I should think that, as a politician, Vinnie Leibell understood that he had to mind his image. And if he didn't, someone on staff should have. Or, perhaps Leibell just didn't listen.

Perhaps it's simply the fact that New York State doesn't take ethics seriously. Alan Rosenthal and Joseph Zimmerman both agree that ethics needs to be taken seriously as a policy issue. There are no easy answers. Attempts at easy answers fail. New York's current ethics law is alone proof of that. The pathetic “mocha protocol” has done nothing to stem the rising tide of legislative corruption.

No matter how much more there is to say on political ethics, I find myself returning again and again to my shock. Vinnie Leibell, who from what I can tell was known for his honesty and integrity and intelligence, is, it would seem, corrupt.

If Vinnie Leibell is corrupt, as far as I am concerned, all of them probably are, to one degree or another.

So, what's wrong with New York?

Perhaps Leibell's troubles will serve as a wake-up call? No, I don't think so. Joe Bruno's conviction wasn't a wake-up call for the Democratic Senate leadership. If it had been, surely the AEG scandal wouldn't have happened.

So, what's wrong with New York? How many wake-up calls does the New York State Legislature need before it finally wakes up? How does New York so-completely break the expectations of people who have spent a career studying politics?

I have cited three Political Scientists in this article. Any one of them, or all of them together, could help to inform a new ethics policy, one which would surely be literate and realistic and deal with the issue in an intelligent way. And they may even have insights into what makes New York so unique, or at least makes it seem so unique, on this front, why New York breaks expectation. Two of them work in walking distance of the New York State Capitol. The other works in New Jersey, which isn't all that far away. Pick up the phone, send staff to the library.

What's wrong with New York?

More words fail me.

The Paranoid Prince: Carl Paladino and Two of America's Darkest Political Traditions

Carl Paladino is many things, but going away is not one of them. First of all he's said he isn't going away. And secondly, nothing about his personality that we've seen in public suggests that he'd go away, even if he hadn't already said he wouldn't.

So, no, as much as we might like, Carl Paladino isn't going away. As a present and potentially future political power, Paladino warrants further consideration despite his crushing loss. His defeat at the hands of Andrew Cuomo was so crushing that it's easy to forget his rout of Rick Lazio to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the first place.

Carl Paladino, I argue, can be understood in part as belonging to two dark American political traditions. Referencing these two traditions is not the only appropriate way to understand Paladino, but they are a way to do so.

One of these traditions is described by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince, one of the most famous books about politics ever written (and deservedly so). Among many other observations, much of Machiavelli's work can be seen as describing politics as a kind of fetishized violence. Politics, as Machiavelli described it, is the imposition of one's whims on the unwilling. Politics is rape.

The other tradition is what Historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style.” The political paranoid tends to see his political enemies as part of a great conspiracy, against the paranoid and against the paranoid's way of life, which typically is seen by the paranoid as representative in some way of the best American traditions and values.

Neither of these traditions are exclusive to America, of course, but we'll mostly be considering them in their American forms.

The Would-Be Prince: Machiavelli and Paladino

In 1513, Niccollo Machiavlli wrote The Prince as in essence a job interview for a gig as a political consultant or adviser. In this work, Machiavelli more or less by accident changed the face of political analysis, and arguably at once made himself into the first modern political scientist and the first modern political consultant, both at once.

The term “Machiavellian” has become something of a political slur, implying a total, amoral ruthlessness. However, legitimate interpretations of Machiavelli do not stop at the famous formulation of “the ends justifies the means.” Machiavelli is much more complex than that, and can alternately be described as either “better” or “worse” than his famous restatement. Better in the sense that there's some evidence that Machiavelli's real ambition was to find a kind of patriot-king to unify Italy and lead it out of a dark spot in its history. Worse in the sense that, if the ends justify the means, that assumes there's some objective moral criteria by which both can be judged. Whereas Machiavelli might suggest that no such moral objectivity exists, and that all we really have is the ends and the means.

As political scientist Hanna Pitkin put it:

Machiavelli's thought is as problematic as politics itself, presenting a different face to each observer. Thus, he is also one of the most misunderstood political theorists, or at any rate the most subject to conflicting interpretations. Some see him as a tough-minded advocate of raison d'etat, others as a romantic who idealized Ancient Rome; some see him as a passionate patriot, others as a cynic; some as a detached, objective observer, others as a teacher of evil; some as a republican, others as worshiping strong leaders and military might. (Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, 1984, page 3)

Pitkin is right even if one only reads The Prince, and neglects his second most famous work, The Discourses on Livy, or his various lesser-known works. If you read those, the picture grows ever-more complex and ambiguous. Machiavelli understood his subject matter well, and arguably the ambiguities in his thought reflect the ambiguities of politics.

Today, I would like to highlight an aspect of Machiavelli that isn't written about as often as other aspects are, and that is his emphasis on politics as fetishized violence, as sexual aggression. Pitkin's book touches on this. She writes about Machiavelli as an advocate of masculine autonomy, as incorporating the various contradictions of masculinity.

One element of masculinity Machiavelli surely does not neglect in The Prince is that of sexually aggressive violence; of politics as a violent imposition of will on another. I have always seen the violence Machiavelli writes about in The Prince as something more than a sad consequence of pursuing politics as the situation requires. Every time I read The Prince, and I've read it a lot, I cannot escape the feeling that there is something fetishized about Machiavelli's violence. Something that suggests maybe the violence itself is a kind of end, as much as it is a means. To be crude about it I can rarely help but wonder if Machiavelli's Prince isn't getting off on the horrors he has to perform.

Doubtlessly, the rawest example of what I'm talking about is this oft-neglected quote, used by Pitkin for the title of her book:

Fortune is a woman who to be kept under must be beaten and roughly handled; and we see that she suffers herself to be more readily mastered by those who so treat her than by those who are more timid when she approaches. And always, like a woman, she favors the young, because they are less scrupulous, and fiercer, and command her with greater audacity. (Machiavelli, The Prince, end of Chapter 25)

I am informed that the more literal translations of this passage actually make the rape image rawer and more horrifying, “beaten and roughly handled” becoming “it is necessary to beat her down, and strike her down.” The closer we get, in other words, to Machiavelli's original words in his own language, the more politics is like rape, the greater the sick horror of the image.

And, indeed, even in the present day, when politics ends with shattered careers and shattered lives rather than a broadsword through the heart or breaking on the wheel or rack, there is an element of fetishized violence in politics, an element of the violent imposition of will of one upon another. Some politicians find it convenient to not compromise, not deliberate, but rather to attempt to steamroll over their enemies, because they see their enemies as true enemies, not as colleagues and honorable opponents.

There is surely an element of fetishized violence in every politician. However, those such as Eliot Spitzer who are so open and public about it are to be feared, because it shows that they likely aren't capable of the other elements of politics, especially democratic politics: deliberation, compromise, negotiation. If the politics they pursue in public is one of violent imposition of will, imagine what they are capable of doing in private. It is scarcely possible to imagine that in private, they deliberate and compromise. It is one thing to compromise after a strongly-worded ideological or policy debate. That's hard, but it's doable. When the imposition of will itself becomes the important thing, however, compromise and deliberation would seem to be nearly impossible.

Carl Paladino can fairly be said to have made his prowess a centerpiece of his campaign. He hard-balled nearly everything. Perhaps the most ridiculous example of this was a bizarre E-Mail exchange with some random fellow who sent him a rude E-Mail about the gay marriage issue. Then, of course, there's the E-Mails that first brought him to prominence (take care with that link by the way, it's "not safe for work"), which included sexually violent images alongside the racist ones. (And, I'm sorry, but a horse having sex with a human woman is violent by definition, even if she wanted it with every fiber of her being.) He threatened to take a baseball bat to Albany, he referred to a sitting United States Senator as a “little girl”
(an obvious attempt to belittle her). He showed us an even-darker side of his violent politics of imposition in an incident involving Fred Dicker of the New York Post (I almost mis-typed and referred to Dicker as a “reporter”). Cal Paladino put his sexual prowess on such display that he in essence, as I have argued here, begged to make it a political issue. And when he succeeded, he then whined.

I haven't even gotten into one quarter of the obviously sexualized moves Paladino made before and during this campaign, for example I haven't cited his numerous exhortations to Andrew Cuomo to debate “like a man.”

These moves will continue for as long as Paladino is in politics, and as I stated he isn't going away. The only question will be whether or not anyone listens anymore.

Machiavelli's aggressive, hyper-sexual politics, as emulated by Carl Paladino, can be seen in stark contrast to the ideal model of how politics in the United States, and by extension in New York State, is supposed to work. That model, best described by James Madison, is a politics of deliberation, compromise, pluralism, and institutions, a politics of laws and informal rules, not men, not personalities. James Madison knew very well that there would be personalities, Princes, in politics. The Madisonian system is designed to both channel and restrain a Machiavellian Prince's ambitions (see Federalist Papers numbers 10 and 51). Madison still feared that sometimes the “mild voice of reason” would be drowned out by a Prince's passions (Federalist Papers number 42). He was right to so fear.

In an American context, you can see this aspect of Machiavelli's politics, the violent and fetishized imposition of will, in the presence of such figures as Newt Gingrich, Carl Paladino, and Eliot Spitzer. These people look at the institutional constraints on them, and laugh and scoff, and decide they will do what they want. Typically, the system constrains them, forces Machiavelli's Prince into a Madisonian hole. Sometimes they are destroyed by the constraint, sometimes they are smart enough to work within Madison's system and get what they want anyway. It all depends on the Prince and his political skill. Either way, however, the intimate relationship between politics and sex is played out on the political battlefield.

The only thing that made Carl Paladino less successful than the other examples I have presented was, to be crude about it, that he couldn't keep it in his pants. Ever. Paladino apparently, for whatever reason, had to be hyper-aggressive all the time. He made his fetishized, violent anger the sole focus of his campaign, the only thing he had going for him. When he attempted to lose it, to avoid making himself look totally ridiculous, he came across as weak and ineffectual. In the gubernatorial debate, for example, Paladino's failures were so obvious that even he had to acknowledge them, though he ridiculously blamed his poor performance on the format. (Which of course was his idea to begin with.) Another example would be Paladino's last-minute, rambling video, recorded in a diner.

Neither the debate nor the diner video allowed Paladino much opportunity to show off his swaggering, aggressive sexuality. Lacking that, he had virtually nothing, and came across badly.

To be Machiavellian in the sense of being ruthless is one thing. Andrew Cuomo is surely Machiavellian in that sense, I know of no one who would dispute that. Paladino's brand of Machiavellianism, however, is something different entirely. Cuomo's Machiavellianism is, if handled properly, the kind that gets things done. Paladino's is chiefly conducive to self-aggrandizement.

There is another American political tradition to which Paladino belongs.

The Paranoid Style

Historian Richard Hofstadter may well have produced the best and most relevant works of academic history ever written. In 1965's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, he, I am sad to say, captured much of the present political era, perhaps more of our present era than the one he wrote during.

American politics, Hofstadter wrote, “has served again and again as as an arena for uncommonly angry minds,” some of which are prone to “qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness [sic], and conspiratorial fantasy.” (Paranoid Style, page 3.) Hofstadter outlined many examples of the paranoid style in American politics. These examples raged from a few now-unknown people who complained that the fluoridation of the water supply was an attempt to institute socialism; to other now-unknown people who complained that a bill introduced in Congress to ban gun sales through the mail was an attempt to institute socialism; to the Black Panthers; to Joseph McCarthy. Outside of an American context, it's led, Hofstadter told us, to such diverse figures as Hitler and Stalin.

Fortunately, at least at the time Hofstadter wrote, the paranoid style was not preferred on American shores by majorities, merely by minorities. In an American context, the paranoid style in Hofstadter's day was and is now primarily, but not exclusively (as the Black Panthers case shows) found on the right. (Paranoid Style, pages 5-10.)

Hofstadter was careful to state that political paranoids were not necessarily paranoid in the psychological or clinical sense. The political paranoid, in the sense of a political actor using the paranoid style, is I suspect rarely, if ever, actually mentally ill. The paranoid style is, after all, a style above all else. The political paranoid is a political persona some present, the same way that Machiavelli's sexual aggression is a persona, and the heroic “white knight” is a persona.

The political paranoid often forgets the distinction between saying that there have been conspiracies in history, and that history is, itself, a conspiracy. The political paranoid holds that there is a vast and sinister conspiracy, somehow both gigantic and subtle, to undermine and destroy our way of life. This conspiracy is a primary, or the primary, force in historical events. Only an all-out-crusade can stop this conspiracy. The end is always just around the corner, and time is forever running out. The crusade against the conspiracy is as-military in nature as it is political in the traditional sense. There can be no compromise, no negotiation, none of the traditional stuff of politics. The enemy is usually personified in some way. The personified enemy is portrayed as moral-less, both politically and sexually. The latter, Hofstadter pointed out to us, has been of particular and surprising importance to political paranoids. It seems to be important to them that their enemies have no sexual morality. The renegade from the enemy, an informant figure, typically is featured prominently. The arguments of the paranoid have a peculiar mix of verifiable and unverifiable proof, with wild extrapolations being made from what is verified to what is not, and in many cases cannot be, verified. (Paranoid Style, pages 29-38.)

As described by Hofstadter, the paranoid style of his day, in America, consisted of the following claims: There is a long-standing conspiracy to undermine capitalism, bring the economy under the control of the federal government, and pave the way for socialism or communism, and high levels of government have been infiltrated by communists. The communists infiltrators in government are supported by a vast network of communist agents throughout the country. Unlike some perpetrators of the paranoid style, American political paranoids often seem to de-emphasize distant, unseen enemies such as the Illuminati, Jews, and the Roman Catholic Church, in favor of then-more-recent, public figures such as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman (Paranoid Style, pages 23-29.)

There is very little that Hofstadter has described that is not seen in Glenn Beck today. Indeed, Glenn Beck's 2009 book Arguing With Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government, the cover of which features Beck in a Soviet military uniform, can be seen as a veritable tribute to the paranoid style, were it not clearly intended to be taken as serious political commentary.

The paranoid style among the contemporary right isn't limited to Glenn Beck; Newt Gingrich has been practicing it for awhile. Note these passages from Gingrich's 1995 book To Renew America:

Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization [American civilization] and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them. (To Renew America, page 7)

In the mid-1960s, this long-held consensus [on American values] began to founder. The counterculture began to repudiate middle-class values . . . “Situational ethics” and “deconstructionism” –the belief that there are no general rules of behavior– began to supplant the centuries-old struggle to establish universal standards of right and wrong.

All this has led to a collapse in our own ability to teach ethical behavior to our own people. Traditional history has been replaced by the notion that every group is entitled to its own version of the past. (To Renew America, page 30)

It is sad indeed if a centuries-old moral consensus had, by 1994, collapsed as a result of a conspiracy that had begun as recently as 1965. Sadder-still is the irony that, to the degree to which Gingrich is correct, the true beneficiaries of deconstructionism have been the American right, as I have outlined here. What else does Glenn Beck do, after all, if not attempt to create his own version of history in the manner suggested by Hofstadter?

Moreover, at least one conservative thinker, Leo Strauss (a teacher and inspiration for many on the contemporary right), seems to date the decay of American values earlier than Gingrich did.

Does this nation [the United States] in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold these 'truths to be self-evident?' (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, page 1.)

Strauss went on to suggest that the decay of American values, indeed the questioning of the very notion of values, can be traced back to Nazi Germany, and that the idea's import to America was in essence a form of Nazi political revenge on America.

It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and as it were annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought. (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, page 2.)

The contemporary rejection of natural rights leads to nihilism – nay, it is identical with nihilism. (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, page 5.)

Strauss wrote these words in 1953, a full 12 years before the date Gingrich gave for the start of the conspiracy. The American right has been practicing the paranoid style for a very long time, and the degree of consistency has been remarkable.

Carl Paladino is in this political tradition too, along with the tradition of Machiavelli's political-sexual aggression.

For the first example, we return to Carl Paladino's last-minute campaign appeal, recorded in a diner, a place of "normal" Americana if ever there was one. At about the 7 minute, 38 second mark of that video, Paladino begins to stray from a message of tax cuts, spending cute, and economic development into the following conspiratorial fantasy, wherein he incorporates an impressive variety of events which someone else might think are, more or less, unrelated. Andrew Cuomo is corrupt, he does not understand honor (presumably the way normal people like Paladino do), and is connected with a corrupt political conspiracy that includes AEG and "Obamacare."

Government corruption is just rampant. My opponent's been the chief prosecutor of a state for three years, a state that has the most corrupt government in America, and now he wants to be a Governor. I don't understand those things. I don't understand why he doesn't respect honor. Honor. You make a promise, you keep the promise. He said at the debate anybody that does anything wrong will go to jail. But at the same time he cut a deal with Hevesi to allow Hevesi to walk! He cut a deal so he could make a political announcement to advance his own political career, so he could say he convicted Hevesi, who he knows won't be sentenced until after, after election day, and he made a deal that the man doesn't have to go to jail. A public official is held to a higher standard, and if we don't put them in jail, we're not sending the right message out for every other public official. And you saw what happened with Aqueduct. Aqueduct. That stunk six months ago. And who's involved. Sampson. Smith. Our Governor's secretary . . . 'Cos in the end, the people today are un-grounded. They don't trust the government. The government is corrupt, the government doesn't do their work, the government gives 'em the worst possible lives in the world, there's nothing on the horizon except it getting worse, Obamacare's gonna lay a million, five hundred thousand new people onto the taxpayers, of the State of New York. My opponent won't speak to the issue. That's what he's afraid of. But the people, they want a government that's gonna cut back on its size.

In the context of a political campaign, with vitriol on the one hand and rational fears of government corruption and incompetence on the other, these remarks weren't necessarily taken as paranoid in the political sense. They were surely not given the same level of scrutiny that Hillary Clinton's oft-quoted "vast right wing conspiracy" remark was given. (And, it should be noted, when talking about New York State's politics, all bets are off and sometimes conspiratorial fantasies can seem true. Or, at least, truer than they probably are.)

Now that a little distance has passed however, granted not much distance, I can hope that Paladino's remarks will be seen in light of the paranoid style, because that's the light in which they make the most sense.

Paladino's use of the paranoid style wasn't limited to election eve. Note his blaming of the now-infamous release of his pornographic E-Mails on Andrew Cuomo's people hacking his computer. The cute thing about that accusation is that when you send an E-Mail, messages by definition leave your computer, and thus no one needs to hack someone your computer to get it. It's already left your computer, because you deliberately sent it out.

Despite his own non-mainstream tastes in pornography and his close association with Roger Stone, a self-described “libertine,” Paladino follows the paranoid style even to the point of questioning his opponents' morality, their connection to the culture's commonly held moral values. (Including, but not limited to, matters of sexual morality.) Here, some will recall, he stated the following about Governor David Paterson.

I'm telling you that Paterson is not your friend. Paterson is, Paterson's a drug addict, he's been a drug addict his entire life.

Paterson has not just used drugs, which presumably any number of otherwise-normal people may experiment with, but he's an "addict." Addicts deviate from our values in a way mere users may not. And, in this video, Paladino made the following now-famous remark:

For weeks the media has badgered me about affairs because, unlike a career politician, I was honest enough to acknowledge she was my daughter when I announced my candidacy. “Are you having an affair now?” “How many have you had?” “When was your daughter conceived?” What I meant to express in my anger was simply this: Does the media ask Andrew such questions? Andrew's prowess is legendary! No! This campaign must be about bigger issues, not affairs or divorces.

Paladino admits his own affairs, but Andrew's, which he to this day has presented neither proof nor even specific allegations about, are “legendary.”

Finally, note the following outburst to the Buffalo City Council, recorded in the Summer of 2010.

Our city has the renown of being known as the second poorest city in America. We worked very very hard to get there, to have that distinction. We've done everything just the opposite of the way things should be done. And now we're, we're drifting over into a socialistic environment. The people that wanna bring to us a community benefit agreement. What is it? ACORN? Sam Hoyt and Sheldon Silver giving us the same old stuff?

The conspirators identified, as is the nature of the conspiracy. The specter of socialism, this time not a world away but very, very close at hand. And, Paladino states, it's been a long time in coming. Luckily, he is there to save Buffalo, and then New York State after that, if only the conspiracy would allow him.

It is very difficult, at least for me, to listen to or read Carl Paladino without the lingering figure of Joseph McCarthy coming up in the corner of my eye. Note McCarthy's rant on Edward Murrow's television program and how it incorporates many elements of the paranoid style which we now see are also reflected in Carl Paladino, and others on the American right. In particular note the use of the accusation presented as fact.

Conclusion

Carl Paladino, New York's paranoid would-be Prince, is not going away. His personality alone probably dictates that much, but more importantly he's not going away because he represents two long-standing tradition in American politics. Those of his ilk have, in fact, obtained prominent roles in the Republican party, and their post-modern, paranoid rants have become mainstream. This is no longer the stuff of secret meetings or Internet message boards. Glenn Beck makes millions of dollars, Sarah Palin is considered a serious presidential candidate, and Carl Paladino defeated the mainstream Rick Lazio to become the official candidate of the Republican party to be Governor of the State of New York.

At the end of the day, as has been shown, in this article and by political experience, Paladino has little if anything save for the paranoid style fused with a fetishized politics of imposition.

It is not to America's, or New York's, credit that he was taken seriously at all, let alone that he's very unlikely to go away anytime soon.