By all rights, this week should be a celebration of the return of our nation to its role as the beacon of liberty and freedom throughout the world. We all know people, or stories of people, born in other countries who yearned for a life in this country of hope and opportunity, but it has not always lived up to those dreams.

Somewhere in the midst of the wrenching changes of the 1960s, the war that was being fought in Vietnam and the parallel war in our streets, and the murders of symbols of hope and progress including the President of the United States and his brother, candidate for the same office as well as Dr. King and Malcolm X, the symbols of one of the key struggles of our time, half the country went in one direction and the other in the opposite. Finally, for the first time since 1965 or so, we seem have that behind us and our new President signals that new age as well anyone could.


There is always a "but" though and this time, as so often, actually, the politics of the state in which I live serve that function. I live in New York: one of the original 13, the home of our nation's first capital (at least under the Constitution) and the largest in the northeast. I am a native of another state, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the country's separation from England began, but I have lived and worked in New York for my entire adult life, including college long ago and regret to report that once again we have proven ourselves to be the most poorly governed large state in the union.

While Illinois goes through its own travail, the joke back here was that we can always do them one better and we have. After electing our own version of George W. Bush to be our governor a full six years before the country did, we replaced him with a spoiled rich kid who used the press' ability to completely misreport almost everything done by state government, to create an image that he was a straight shooting do gooder. He was not, and there was ample evidence of that quite in the public domain well before he got elected (he had even admitted lying about the financing of his campaign for Attorney General before winning that office, for instance) and once he became Governor his complete unfitness for any position other than dictator of a third world country was fully displayed for about a year before he exploded in front of our very eyes.

New York, with its state government tucked 140 miles north of the news capital of the world, operates in virtual secrecy under a system which most resembles the federal Congress at the turn of the 20th century. The members of the two houses of the Legislature are largely ceremonial and all decisions are made by the Speaker of the Assembly and his counterpart in the Senate, usually called the Majority leader, but legally the Temporary President of the Senate.

Except for two years in the post Goldwater 1960s, the Senate has been controlled by a party called "Republican" and the Assembly by another one called "Democratic." (People from outside our state confuse these labels with the same name of the national parties but the resemblance is often coincidental.) The recent elections with so many new voters in support of President Obama, caused the Democrats to have a nominal majority, but it took them almost two months to settle this issue and its majority seems fragile.

When the smart, rich boy became Governor he thought he had been elected King, or at least the Authority of Importance, as in the federal system. When a statewide office became vacant, and the law permitted the Legislature acting as one house the power to fill it (meaning, in that NY way, that the Speaker got to decide who gets the job), the Smart Rich Boy said he would have a say in this, against logic, history and everything else. He lost that fight and a few others with a Legislature used to doing things their way.

Those ways are often alleged as crimes. The Senate Minority Leader was indicted a decade or so ago, on the charge that he stole money by having staff paid by the state do no work on its behalf, other than campaign for members of his party. Our highest court dismissed that charge but told the Legislature not to do it again.

Several Assembly Speakers have been indicted and now the recent Senate Majority Leader has been. So many members were indicted a few years ago, that some people thought the Legislature could qualify as a corrupt organization under the federal R.I.C.O. statute.

The Smart Rich Boy responded to all of this by a crude spying operation against the now indicted Sen Bruno, then the Majority Leader. He lied about doing it as well giving rise to sympathy for someone clearly not entitled to it.

In the meantime, the Smart Rich Boy, decided to flame himself out of office which fooling around with high priced prostitutes. That allowed the Lieutenant Governor, the son of a formerly powerful politician, but a lightweight in every sense of the word, to become Governor. He immediately disclosed having had an affair with a state employee on his payroll and leaked her name to the press to show his bona fides, I guess.

Now this same kindly but way out of his league supposed Governor, two weeks after a State of the State speech that all but established his inability to serve in the position he holds, has managed to appoint the daughter of well positioned Republican lobbyist to the United States Senate (as a Democrat---the party she chose to run on when elected to Congress during the first of the two George W. Bush-influenced elections which allowed Democrats to win seats formerly outside their reach). In doing so, he has angered the many who treasure the memory of President Kennedy and would have be honored to have his daughter, rather than Doug Rutnik's, as our United States Senator. (No offense to Rutnik, a very decent guy, especially in the filthy world of New York politics and particularly given his political leanings. Seeing Alfonse D'Amato standing with our new Senator established, however, how wrong a pick Rutnik's daughter was, especially after Caroline Kennedy was rejected and then maligned by the Governor's people.)

That is the state in which I live. Caroline Kennedy's uncle, once he was elected to the seat she did not get appointed to, tried to move the state party closer to the progressive wing of the national party and the inroads he made still have relevance, but there was a long way to go when he was murdered and little progress since then. I thought, perhaps, a new Senator Kennedy would pick up where her uncle left off. Maybe that is why Gov Paterson, a full fledged member and defender of the NY political establishment, was so opposed to her candidacy. Maybe, it was that she could not glad hand in the true New York tradition. Whatever it was, we wuz robbed again, but I have lived here since the 1970s and should be used to that by now.