Governors For Nothing And Their Chicks For Free, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #160

March 8, 2010 Mike Gold 9 Comments

I was really, really naïve, but I finally figured it out. Given a choice, we usually elect the most amusing governor on the ballot. Sometimes we know what we’re doing; sometimes we just get lucky.

Let’s start out with the best governor of this bunch: Jesse “The Body” Ventura of Minnesota. Previous job experience – World Wrestling Federation champion. Then there’s that idiot in Illinois Rod Blagojevich. He might not be guilty of any crime – we’ll see about that – but he certainly is an idiot. Then we got Alaska’s militant moron, Sarah Palin; she didn’t even have the commitment to stick out her one and only term. More recently, South Carolina gave us Mark Sanford, another one of those “family values” guys who cheated on his wife big time. And by “big time,” I don’t just mean he went to South America on the state’s dime to screw his mistress. I mean, he wrote her wonderful love letters. In writing. For anybody to read.

And I’m talking all in just the past seven years or so.

But no place and nobody can beat my area of the nation, the New York / New Jersey / Connecticut triumvirate, home to 31,535,552 people – one-tenth of our nation’s population. Out in New Jersey, they lost a governor for the popular crime of screwing around on his wife, except this time he was screwing the man who happened to be the state’s homeland security advisor. Jim McGreevey was the nation’s only openly gay governor, except that wasn’t his idea and he held that title for only a brief period. He’s now pursuing a Master of Divinity degree.

Up here in Connecticut, we had us a governor named John Rowland. In 2006 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, mail fraud and tax fraud. He served ten months in a federal prison and four months house arrest. He’s since scored a gig as economic development coordinator for Waterbury, Connecticut.

But as in all things, New York takes credit for taking the cake. But this time it deserves it. In 2008, Eliot Spitzer was implicated in a prostitution sting. The man hired $1,000 an hour Washington hookers; to his credit, he usually spent two or three hours with them. He resigned, and his lieutenant governor, David Paterson, was sworn in.

On the day after his inauguration, both Paterson and his wife disclosed they had been having extramarital affairs, one with a state employee. Okay, that’s not great, but you figure he got it behind him early and everything would be downhill from there, right?

Well, not quite. A week later Paterson admitted to having used both marijuana and cocaine. Timing is everything, Dave.

Since then, he has been accused of hustling World Series tickets and lying under oath during the subsequent investigation, more important, using illegal persuasion tactics to protect one of his lackeys who seems to have had a tendency to beat the crap out of his girl friend. He is also accused of coercing his staff to take direct action in the alleged cover-up.

The dude’s only been governor for two years – well, two years next week. Whereas he withdrew his bid for reelection (he couldn’t raise subway fare, let alone campaign expenses), he refuses to resign from office despite calls from both sides of the aisle and most media outlets.

Well, he shouldn’t. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. For that matter, nor had Spitzer, McGreevey or Blagojevich. The often-ignored concept of “innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law” applies to those in public office as well as to the rest of us. But I’ll bet Paterson caves in. The pressure is unbelievable, and if he can cut a deal to make some of it go away if he leaves, he’ll do so in a New York minute.

The next guy will only have a few months before election to screw up. Talk about pressure.

Comics industry ancient one and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every live-long day at the same venue. I think he’s a commie or something.