The blackheart who voted for Hillary, and other tales

So here’s something I’m going to regret: I voted for Hillary Clinton.
I don’t live upstate anymore and I don’t pretend to be an expert — well, OK, I sometimes pretend — but supposedly my fellow blackhearted conservatives who sit on the board of Corning Inc. are thrilled with Hillary, and have even raised money for her. Good enough. I took the plunge.
It’s noteworthy that a junior senator in the minority party had enough juice to steer defense and aerospace contracts to upstate employers. Yea, Hillary. (But I’m obviously not voting for her for president. No way.)
I voted third-party for governor and attorney general, since the four major candidates combined didn’t equal one Pete King. Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, since you asked, got where he is by demonizing successful people for political gain. The word for that is McCarthyism. Spitzer went after Wall Street — because everybody hates Wall Street — but did nothing about the government corruption he was elected to fix. The word for that is hypocrisy. Medicaid? Yup, still broken.
Write me letters and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll print them all. But I think I’m right.


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Trivia question: What do Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Gates and Britney Spears have in common?
The answer is they’re celebrities who have donated their likenesses to the American Library Association, which produces posters for member branches featuring stars who promote literacy and encourage young people to read.
But when visitors entered the lobby of the Long Beach Library in the weeks leading up to the election, whose smiling face did they see on such a poster? It was every 11-year-old’s idol: Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, holding a book.
We’re all probably a bit numbed by how readily elected officials will dance around their ethical obligations. In this case, the poster complied with the letter of the law in that it was not, technically, campaign material on display in a taxpayer-funded library. But the spirit of the law — and really, decency itself — has been thrown under a train.
Weisenberg is just one of scores of lawmakers who posed for these posters, which were distributed free to libraries across the state by the New York Library Association, a lobbying group that knew vanity would not be in short supply in Albany in an election year. More than 80 representatives from both parties took the lobbyists up on the opportunity to model, according to the group’s Web site, and one of them was Weisenberg.
We would give a less unctuous lawmaker a pass, but for Weisenberg this is just the latest in a series of affronts to good taste. No one should need reminding that this is the man who haunted commuters for years with a questionably financed billboard featuring himself in a Speedo.
If Weisenberg wants to support literacy, he could direct more state aid toward upgrading the library’s facilities, buying new computers, books, periodicals and, yes, literacy posters featuring celebrities that young people might actually want to emulate.
Nobody on Long Island can claim to be shocked any more at the lengths to which elected officials will go to appear in print, but I must say I expected a little better of the library. Whether or not the people who run it support Weisenberg is immaterial; the poster, displayed as prominently as it is — it’s still up — is nothing if not a tacit endorsement. Weisenberg’s opponent last week, Republican Francis X. McQuade, would have faced ejection and possible arrest if he had tried to put a poster of himself up in the library.
The facility’s director, George Trepp, offered this admittedly fair response: “What if it was a poster of George W. Bush?”
To be sure, President Bush, his wife, his mother and all of his recent predecessors of both parties have appeared, honorably, in just this type of promotion. But no matter what you may think of the current president, his is an office people respect and to which they aspire. We seriously doubt young readers are inspired by — or, more to the point, were the intended target of — the assemblyman’s poster.