He Knew All The Words

There is one man who recently elevated the progressive platform to unprecedented heights in the state of New York. One man who made promises that this was our time. He was a leader, an innovator, and a tough-as-nails fighter. He was a man who was finally going to deliver on the promise of progressive politics in the state of New York, to allow us to rival the progressive platforms that have been pushed — and which unfortunately have yet to flower — in California, Washington, Illinois, and other states. We were going to win because of this man.

And then Eliot Spitzer proved he was not up to the job.

Personally, I don’t give a shit about who screws whom, and whether it was paid for, illegal, or what. I have no moral compass when it comes to investigating and prosecuting prostitution rings and then turning around and being a client of them. I simply couldn’t care less about such matters. Except for a little concept called political reality. Eliot Spitzer made a lot of promises, and he broke every single fucking one of them by self-destructing while in the office of governor.

And now he wants to speak up and try to cast doubt on the abilities of the next best possible hope for any kind of real liberal governance of the state, his successor in the Attorney General’s office, Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Spitzer, would you do us all a favor, and shut the hell up?

Spitzer was going to get a lot of work done. He was going to change the tone of Albany. He was going to run roughshod over the status quo of power and corruption. And instead, shortly after a year of his swearing in, he was resigning from a scandal that not only painted him as inconsistent and power-hungry, but a scandal which showed him to be breaking the law.

And since then the economy has turned to shit, the culture of Albany turned even more sour than it was, the Democrats lost control of their own legislature due to lack of discipline and the powers of corruption, and every major issue dear to the hearts of New York progressives — from education to labor to gay rights — has suffered a breakdown or loss or inevitable backtracking due to the fact that Spitzer became the posterboy for all that is wrong with the state.

So when I — who still lacks the basic civil right to get married in my own state — read the bitter crocodile tears of a man who not only broke a law that is very simple to abide by but let his own actions cause his own political destruction and derail progressive politics in the state for another decade, forgive me if I sound harsh in saying:

ELIOT SPITZER, PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO CRAWL INTO A HOLE AND DIE. ASSHOLE.

A recent article in The New York Times is interesting not just for what it shows about our city health commissioner, but what it says about the Times itself.

Dr. Thomas Frieden is the man behind Mayor Bloomberg’s successful health initiatives–all the good stuff from the smoking ban to free condom distribution, electronic health records, and the elimination of transfats from NYC restaurants. He’s widely recognized as a true leader in the overlap area of government and medicine that is known as Public Health. His newest initiative is a reduction in the salt content of mass-produced foods. His aim is for this reduction to be voluntary on the part of the corporations that produce mass-market foods (including large chain restaurants). His pitch to the food industry, from the article:

Over the next five years, identify the foods that are contributing the most sodium to people’s diets and cut the level of salt by 25 percent. In a decade, cut it by another 25 percent. And do it in unison with your competitors.

If they refuse?

“If there’s not progress in a few years, we’ll have to consider other options, like legislation,” he said in an interview last week.

The article talks about how the high-profile moves New York has made under Frieden–like posting calorie-counts at fast food chains–have led other areas of the country to follow suit. Not only could this new initiative be expected to do the same, it’s actually being touted by Frieden himself as a national initiative.

But then the Times seems to go out of its way to swing the article toward undermining the commissioner. They naturally run quotes from a food industry group–the Grocery Manufacturers Association–which introduces legal and political issues that do not get picked up on again in the article, nor is anyone given the opportunity to refute them. Summarizing the spokesman for the GMA, the article suggests that “getting many companies to do something at the same time might have antitrust implications.” One can imagine the Mayor’s office might have a reply to that, but the article’s author, Kim Severson, doesn’t go there so we never find out.

And while the initiative has the support of “a half-dozen other health departments around the country and organizations like the American Medical Association” the last word on any medical issues is given to the contrary position:

Beyond the technical hurdles, Dr. Frieden might encounter resistance on scientific grounds. Some medical researchers question whether a mass reduction in sodium is the best way to spend public-health resources when losing weight and quitting cigarettes would do more for the country’s heart health.

Some medical researches, huh? Which ones do you think those are? The Times doesn’t say. (And what about the weird linguistic jujitsu in that short paragraph? “Resistance on scientific grounds” has “medical researchers” offering a budget analysis of the initiative. The only science I detect in that is political science.)

I’m glad that our local (and national) paper of record is giving us information about the newest undertakings of what is arguably one of our city’s most successful departments, but the kind of weird political undertone to the article makes me think either the paper or the reporter has some agenda against this initiative that isn’t being revealed. That may not be the case, of course. But allowing industry spokespeople to raise issues in opposition to the plan without digging deeper into those issues, along with the age-old media reliance on the ever-mysterious “some” who “say” something or other simply to make it look like a reporter is covering both sides of a question, both give me pause.