The Times Addresses the Nagging Question of “Thoughts About ‘That’ Mess in Albany?”
In an earlier blog, my ignorance was obvious. Why were those legislators primping and strutting as if they were immune to the disgrace mounting and mounting before them? The news media, I surmised, weren’t going after them savagely enough and should start treating them the way that news organizations treat perps when they perp walk.
So, I found a good explanation.
NYT Headline: Albany Festers, and Voters Don’t Clean House
Third paragraph: “But for those wondering how Albany could have sunk to the level it has, with the State Senate unable to function, one good answer is the extraordinary comfort among the state’s legislators that comes with knowing that they will almost never be voted out of office.”
Fourth paragraph: “Many people inside and outside state government agree that such a comfort level has bred a kind of arrogance among the legislators about the costs of even profound embarrassments.”
Thirteenth paragraph: “People wouldn’t behave this way if they thought their jobs were at stake,†said Gerald Benjamin, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at New Paltz.”*
All this reminds me of a news series I did about burglary, one of the first I did for the first newspaper I ever wrote for, the project inspired by the comment of a Monroe County Sheriff’s Department investigator: QMfE, “If your readers stopped purchasing stolen merchandise, there would be no burglaries and we would be reassigned.”
*Professor Benjamin could have been talking about The-Four-Barnacles-of-the-Apocalypse
Tags: Albany, New York State Politics, New York Times, political corruption, Professor Gerald Benjamin, the WORD blog