DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE ASS ON THE WAY OUT
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, you dictatorial son of a bitch.
You have been at war with your state's residents since the day you swore in, and the only downside of your departure is that it comes a decade too late. You have destroyed one of the greatest states in the nation, and presided over and been the cause of some of New York's darkest days.
You don't love anybody but yourself, and you have served nothing but your own self-interest.
You leave our state more divided, embittered and impoverished than it has ever been. You have gutted the Southern Tier, depopulated upstate, endangered the streets and enfeebled the laws. You have turned people against one another at every turn, and you never showed the slightest ability to or interest in understanding the lives and priorities of the people over whom you ruled.
And you have bastardized and castrated the democratic process. Each of your signature policy advances came by short circuiting normal procedure and shutting citizens and even legislators from the process.
You boast of advancing gay marriage, but forget that you had to cheat the system to do it. You boast of the Safe Act and your war against guns, but likewise forget that you had to cheat to get it passed.
As an entire region of your state faced the starkest poverty in the nation, and looked to hydrofracking to save it, you dragged out a process for years on end, giving satisfaction to neither side and ultimately deciding by not deciding, by taking one side when it was the only side left.
You said that rural, upstate Republicans – “extreme conservatives” you called them -- had no place in New York, and you set about pushing them out, through taxes and regulations and antagonistic policies, until you changed the demographic of entire regions and drove more than a million New Yorkers away from the homes and into other states. No governor in any state in any era has so depopulated his state – in hard numbers or percentages – or so brazenly driven out those who disagreed with him. You conducted a cultural cleansing of upstate people, dispossessing hundreds of thousands of them from a state that had been their home for generations.
And it wasn’t just Republicans.
You sold out your own party to promote an alliance with Senate Republicans and breakaway Democrats to thwart the rank-and-file progressives who put you in office year after year. When local officials crossed you – Republican or Democrat – you punished them by penalizing their constituents, denying them aid or access to state programs.
You were an equal-opportunity bastard, cruel and vindictive at every turn, a Caesar for sure, but a later, besotted, incompetent one, somewhere between a Caligula and a Nero.
You named a bridge after your father, but shamed his name with your conduct and attitude, a spoiled rich boy who lived off the power of others until he got big enough to claim and misuse it on his own.
You gave proof to the Biblical assertion that, “When the wicked rule, the people mourn,” and mourn they did, through debts and deficits and downturns and dictates. Until as their parents died behind doors you barred, some doomed by policies you ordered and concealed, the agony of a worst-in-the-nation pandemic raged in your streets while you preened for the cameras and sent lackeys to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal for a book you would neither truly write nor believe.
You raged across the state, in spectacles of self-pleasure, followed by sycophants and courted by the obsequious, the great enabling army of scrap feeders, condescendingly warning others not to “get ahead of the governor.”
And so you preened, the naked emperor before a people too terrified and oppressed to tell you the truth.
Until a woman stood up.
And another, and another.
Women of talent and potential and drive who came to government to serve and grow and lead, but whom you treated as playthings, as baubles, as adornments and decorations, as objects of your crude and caddish advances, and worse.
Women who told the truth, in the face of your torrent of lies. They were Davids to your Goliath. They were Lindseys to your Cuomo. They were doers of right in a culture of wrong.
And they prevailed, and the truth prevailed, and the system prevailed, and the right thing was done.
They got Capone on tax evasion, and they Cuomo on sexual harassment, and sometimes that’s how it is with monsters.
They rage and they roar, and people suffer and cower.
But the good guys win in the end.
And this, Andy, is your end.
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2021
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You have been at war with your state's residents since the day you swore in, and the only downside of your departure is that it comes a decade too late. You have destroyed one of the greatest states in the nation, and presided over and been the cause of some of New York's darkest days.
You don't love anybody but yourself, and you have served nothing but your own self-interest.
You leave our state more divided, embittered and impoverished than it has ever been. You have gutted the Southern Tier, depopulated upstate, endangered the streets and enfeebled the laws. You have turned people against one another at every turn, and you never showed the slightest ability to or interest in understanding the lives and priorities of the people over whom you ruled.
And you have bastardized and castrated the democratic process. Each of your signature policy advances came by short circuiting normal procedure and shutting citizens and even legislators from the process.
You boast of advancing gay marriage, but forget that you had to cheat the system to do it. You boast of the Safe Act and your war against guns, but likewise forget that you had to cheat to get it passed.
As an entire region of your state faced the starkest poverty in the nation, and looked to hydrofracking to save it, you dragged out a process for years on end, giving satisfaction to neither side and ultimately deciding by not deciding, by taking one side when it was the only side left.
You said that rural, upstate Republicans – “extreme conservatives” you called them -- had no place in New York, and you set about pushing them out, through taxes and regulations and antagonistic policies, until you changed the demographic of entire regions and drove more than a million New Yorkers away from the homes and into other states. No governor in any state in any era has so depopulated his state – in hard numbers or percentages – or so brazenly driven out those who disagreed with him. You conducted a cultural cleansing of upstate people, dispossessing hundreds of thousands of them from a state that had been their home for generations.
And it wasn’t just Republicans.
You sold out your own party to promote an alliance with Senate Republicans and breakaway Democrats to thwart the rank-and-file progressives who put you in office year after year. When local officials crossed you – Republican or Democrat – you punished them by penalizing their constituents, denying them aid or access to state programs.
You were an equal-opportunity bastard, cruel and vindictive at every turn, a Caesar for sure, but a later, besotted, incompetent one, somewhere between a Caligula and a Nero.
You named a bridge after your father, but shamed his name with your conduct and attitude, a spoiled rich boy who lived off the power of others until he got big enough to claim and misuse it on his own.
You gave proof to the Biblical assertion that, “When the wicked rule, the people mourn,” and mourn they did, through debts and deficits and downturns and dictates. Until as their parents died behind doors you barred, some doomed by policies you ordered and concealed, the agony of a worst-in-the-nation pandemic raged in your streets while you preened for the cameras and sent lackeys to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal for a book you would neither truly write nor believe.
You raged across the state, in spectacles of self-pleasure, followed by sycophants and courted by the obsequious, the great enabling army of scrap feeders, condescendingly warning others not to “get ahead of the governor.”
And so you preened, the naked emperor before a people too terrified and oppressed to tell you the truth.
Until a woman stood up.
And another, and another.
Women of talent and potential and drive who came to government to serve and grow and lead, but whom you treated as playthings, as baubles, as adornments and decorations, as objects of your crude and caddish advances, and worse.
Women who told the truth, in the face of your torrent of lies. They were Davids to your Goliath. They were Lindseys to your Cuomo. They were doers of right in a culture of wrong.
And they prevailed, and the truth prevailed, and the system prevailed, and the right thing was done.
They got Capone on tax evasion, and they Cuomo on sexual harassment, and sometimes that’s how it is with monsters.
They rage and they roar, and people suffer and cower.
But the good guys win in the end.
And this, Andy, is your end.
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2021
