Battle of the Idiots

This election day, those in council district 30 will chose between Liz Crowley and Anthony Como. That alone is a sad situation.

In the special election earlier this year, both the Democrat and Republican parties had two candidates each who wanted to run for that seat. And both parties turned their back on the quality candidate to back the dud.

The Democrats backed Lizzie Crowley, a moderately likeable but clueless personality whose only qualification for office is being related to Congresman Joe Crowley - who arranged lots of endorsements from fellow Democratic machine hacks and unions. Lizzie's lack of any practical experience and campaign violation fines from a previous run didn't seem to bother anyone. The shuned Charlie Ober, financial executive and civic activitst with decades of experience. Furthermore, he was harrassed by other Dems for daring to run against the party's choice - a disgusting and unforgivable act.

The Republicans backed Anthony Como, a bumbling buffoon lawyer with no likeable personal qualites whatsoever. His public demeanor is embarassingly bad, and hearing him speak is almost as painful as seing the tasteless McMansion he built to discrace a nice Middle Village neighborhood. The GOP turned its back on former councilman Tom Ognibene. This veteran, who displayed a mastery of both public speaking and public policy, could easily wipe the floor with any of the other candidates. Make no mistake, he was a professional politician, but at least he knew what he was doing, acted professionally, inspired confidence.

Sadly, Anthony Como somehow came out on top of that special election. In recent weeks, Como sold out on the term limits vote and put out a fake endorsement from a Catholic cardinal, later refuted by the church. So as I suspected, he's proven to be an embarrassment to the district. Now he wants us to re-elect him.

Worse yet, neither Ober nor Ognibene have chosen to run in the General election this Tuesday, leaving only Como and Crowley to battle it out. I guess the knife wounds the parties inflicted on them last spring are still fresh. So what was an opportunity to get someone decent to replace Dennis Gallagher, has now been reduced to the usual dilema we have to make at the polls: chosing the lesser of two evils.

I am not going to tell you who to vote for. My message is this:

You can thank party leadership for giving us these poor choices. Clearly, neither of these two are the best we have to offer, but they're the ones with their tounges up the party leader's asses. So no matter who wins on Tuesday, we all lose.

Fuck the Democrats and Fuck the Republicans. They both fucked us.